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Gothika
(Reviewed October 26, 2003)
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How infuriatingly stupid is this moronic abomination? So stupid that you will wonder if the producers purposely intended to allow even the most slow-witted cretin in the audience to feel intellectually
superior to this shoddy, lousy product. A skinned potato in a beaker of urine could come up with a better plot and more believable characters than are to be found in this witless, pointless, thoroughly
unengaging waste of time.
Although insults to the intelligence abound here, only a single egregious instance should be enough to convince you to expend your entertainment dollar elsewhere: This is one of those would-be
scary movies in which a ghost can open locked doors, throw people around, interfere with electrical systems, drive a car, burst into flame, paint cryptic words on a wall, and slash the same words on a
character's arm with a scalpel...but who apparently can't simply pick up a pencil and write on a piece of paper. That is all it would take, you see, for this particular ghost to get across the message it is
trying to convey; namely, to explain the real circumstances of her death and identify the guilty. Did I mention that this ghost WRITES REAL WORDS with a scalpel and with paint in the movie, proving
that she is fully literate and able to communicate? Just wanted to make sure you got that.
Much as I detested this movie -- and I hated it so much that it is absolutely guaranteed to make my worst-of-the-year list -- I'll actually do the producers a favor by letting you in on something that
might help you despise it a little less than I did. Everything about this flick is so unbelievable, so entirely lacking in even the merest hint of credibility, that you will be certain most of what you are seeing
has to be a dream, a hallucination or some other sort of bizarre, only-in-the-character's-imagination fantasy. Halle Berry is one of the most beautiful women on the planet, and I know that should not lead to any assumptions
about her brainpower, but I had a damned hard time buying her as a prison psychiatrist. I had an even harder time believing that her character would be married to massively overweight baldo Charles
Dutton. (The temperature in the theatre actually drops 20 degrees when they share what is supposed to be a playfully romantic kiss. Maybe that's due to the strong winds created when several hundred
people desperately whip their heads around at the same time to look away from the screen.) And could anyone as skin-crawlingly offputting as mumble-mouth Robert Downey Jr. possibly be allowed to
treat human patients even in a prison in our world? Christ, the guy is almost as annoying and snarky as Richard Roeper. Even the meekest nutcase would kill him with his prissy little black-plastic glasses before lunch!
And yet even though every painful second of this movie shouts "fake, fake, fake," it turns out NOT to be a dream, not a hallucination, not a fantasy. You actually are supposed to believe that
everything you see actually takes place in the story. There's no twist, no clever "gotcha," none of that. All of the dumbness is deliberate.
Halle Berry certainly is taking a strange and unfortunate career path by doing pathetically worthless shit like this AFTER winning an Oscar. At this rate, she'll be turning up in bukkake porn by
next summer. (File under "silver lining?")
Back Row Grade: F-minus, minus, minus...
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