Quite possibly the biggest cinematic disappointment so far this
year, the movie
”
Dreamcatcher,
”
currently playing at Premiere Cinemas, falls flat on the big
screen.
Quite possibly the biggest cinematic disappointment so far this year, the movie “Dreamcatcher,” currently playing at Premiere Cinemas, falls flat on the big screen.
I think someone should have told director Lawrence Kasdan that there is a difference between gory and scary.
You would think that considering the recent rebirth of the movie thriller through films like “The Sixth Sense,” “The Others,” “Signs” and “What Lies Beneath” movie makers would understand that repeatedly splattering the screen with fake human blood and horrific death scenes alone are not scary.
Yes, those kind of scenes have some shock value, but as the movie progresses the audience jumps a little bit less each time to the shock trick. And even the time honored use of someone or something from off-camera suddenly popping into the scene, gets old after a while.
Those kinds of movies are like bad Chinese food, a couple hours after you’ve had some your still left feeling empty.
The scariest thing about this Warner Brothers release is that it is two hours and 15 minutes long. How they used that much film stock to make such a bad movie is beyond me. This movie, which has only Morgan Freeman’s acting to look forward to, is longer than some of Hollywood’s best films such as “Citizen Kane,” “Casablanca,” “Psycho,” “The Exorcist” or “The Sixth Sense.”
“Dreamcatcher” is based on a Stephen King novel, the first King wrote after his near-fatal 1999 accident in which he was run over by a hit-and-run driver.
The story centers around four grown men who’ve been friends since grade school but who as adults have comer to a strange crossroads in their lives where they feel trapped and listless. There is a suicidal psychiatrist, Henry (played by Thomas Jane), a talkative carpenter, Beaver (played by Jason Lee), a college professor, Jonesy (played by Damian Lewis) and a frustrated car salesman, Pete (played by Timothy Olyphant) all find themselves marking time in what they call an “SSDD” existence, roughly translated as same stuff, different day.
What unites these men is their connection with another childhood friend, the mentally challenged Duddits (played by Donnie Wahlberg).
As kids, they saved Duddits from a pack of sadistic bullies, and as a result they all seem to have been given a kind of telepathy that allows them to read minds and sense some of the future.
These talents come in handy during a hunting trip in Maine. The group gets split up, and Jonsey and Beaver save a disoriented hunter who is acting strangely, and his stomach seems to be growing at an alarming rate. If you’ve seen any of the “Alien” movies, as King clearly has, you have a good idea of what’s going to happen after that
What these group doesn’t realize is that an alien lifeform is using their bodies as hosts to breed new versions of themselves.
This is where Morgan Freeman’s character of Colonel Curtis comes in, he leads a super secret military group called Blueboy, which goes around wiping out extraterrestrial visitors. Tom Sizemore olays Curtis’ trusted ally Owen Underhill who thinks Curtis has gone mad.
