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Film
Don't catch this nightmare
[Photo: Warner Bros.]
The buddies in Dreamcatcher, a film based on Stephen King’s novel, are played by, from left, Damian Lewis, Thomas Jane, Timothy Olyphant and Jason Lee. |
By STEVE PERSALL, Times Film Critic
© St. Petersburg Times
published March 20, 2003
The ingredients of a Stephen King tale are here, but it's hard to decide if this gory, muddled recipe for horror is half-baked or simply overdone.
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Stephen King was recuperating after being hit by a van when he wrote Dreamcatcher, flexing his writing muscles before they atrophied. Like his physical therapy, the process made a big deal of his simplest, most familiar moves. Reading the book was like watching King perform knee bends; nice to see him working out again, but with a long way to go before returning to full literary strength.
Only the idea of King's comeback made the book interesting. It is puzzling, then, that gifted screenwriters Lawrence Kasdan (The Big Chill, Raiders of the Lost Ark, two Star Wars flicks) and William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President's Men, The Princess Bride) would have any interest in adapting it for the screen.
Kasdan told the film's world premiere audience in Las Vegas two weeks ago that he has always been too squeamish to watch horror movies. That may explain why, as the director, he dotes on so many common tensions and groaningly graphic terrors in Dreamcatcher.
Because of Kasdan's inexperienced perspective, the movie feels as if it were made by someone who thinks we haven't seen all this before and doesn't know how far over the top he's going. He thinks horror springs only from gory details, and logic be damned. Truly frightening films don't show much and have rational explanations for everything. Dreamcatcher is either a spoof taking itself too seriously, or a serious film too silly to be considered one.
Goldman has worked with King's words before, but not this kind of grisly prose. He adapted Hearts in Atlantis, possibly the author's gentlest effort, and Misery, one of King's least violent and most disturbing tales. Here, the writing seems arrogantly naive of what makes for good terror. It wasn't in King's book, or in Kasdan and Goldman's screenplay.
Dreamcatcher is a checklist of familiar King riffs: a quarantined plague (The Stand), childhood pals bonded by a macabre experience (Stand by Me, It), a mentally challenged savior (The Stand again), harshly frigid elements and a handicapped hero (Misery), plus a sci-fi angle that King has never really mastered, so rehab gave him time to tinker.
The four friends -- Jonesy (Damien Lewis), Pete (Timothy Olyphant), Henry (Thomas Jane) and Beaver (Jason Lee) -- share a telepathic link as well, a hokey device leading to one of the dumbest things I've ever seen on screen: One guy uses a pistol like a telephone receiver to speak with another. If the rest of the film contained a spark of similar lunacy, it might work. As a stand-alone gimmick, it's the point when the movie just gives up.
The guys go camping, where they encounter two victims of an alien invasion by parasites that gestate in human hosts, emerging bloodily from a place where the sun doesn't shine. Yes, we get to see those "hatchings" in full hemorrhaging color. The invaders look like giant, slithering slugs with a cobra cowl and bear-trap teeth, all the better to eat you, my dear.
The U.S. government knows about the invasion, sending in a special task force led by Col. Abraham Curtis (Morgan Freeman, terribly miscast), a 25-year veteran of alien hunting. In the book, the character's name was Col. Kurtz, a nod to Apocalypse Now's equally demented officer. Col. Curtis has a scheme to murder hundreds of innocent citizens before the plague spreads, a tactic quietly questioned by his sergeant (Tom Sizemore).
So far, so bad. Jonesy gets cloned and inhabited by the alien leader, weirdly dubbed Mr. Gray, forcing Lewis into embarrassing scenes of conversing with himself, switching from a stuffy British accent to American bland. Lee's crude holy-smoke dialogue isn't missed when he gets bumped off early, Jane walks through his strong, silent-type demands and Olyphant waits wide-eyed for his turn to be eaten.
The movie veers without warning from claustrophobic drama to outlandish special effects: for example, an alien-slug stampede with helicopters blowing them to bits. So many subplots whiz by that none are especially memorable. Unless they're just plain unfortunate, as when Henry locates his mentally challenged mascot Duddits (Donnie Wahlberg), whose supernatural powers lead to the final showdown with Mr. Gray. Or is it Jonesy? Or do we care?
Dreamcatcher
Grade: D
Director: Lawrence Kasdan
Cast: Morgan Freeman, Thomas Jane, Damien Lewis, Donnie Wahlberg, Timothy Olyphant, Tom Sizemore, Jason Lee
Screenplay: William Goldman, Lawrence Kasdan, based on the novel by Stephen King
Rating: R; gory violence, profanity
Running time: 134 min.
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