Shutter Island - % % %

To start with, this is a film about a US Marshall played by Leonardo DiCaprio who enters a mental asylum for the criminally insane to investigate the disappearance of a prisoner/patient. You immediately know that the obvious plot would be some version of insidious hospital torturing sane patients or an insane narrator. We’ve all seen these movies before. And this doesn’t disappoint by avoiding obvious plot expectations. It disappoints by following them and then flushing them out completely until you are bored and then bored again as everything gets spelled out. I don’t need to ruin the “twist” but you know exactly what it is without me saying anything.

It’s too bad because the first hour of the film is beautiful and haunting. There are striking dream imagery and some genuinely scary moments. But this is the problem. The first half of the film is dramatic and filled with action, sets, interesting characters and complex conversations. It starts as a surreal mystery and then the last hour and a half is several boring conversations. There’s an entire scene of at least five minutes that feels interminable in which DiCaprio has a boring conversation with Patricia Clarkson that consists entirely of cutting between a close-up of him and a close-up of her. Back and forth and back and forth. I’m insulted by how boring it was. And then there are another two or three scenes of conversations that explain one way of looking at things and then explain in words another way and then Ben Kingsley who runs the asylum uses a diagram written on a board to explain something else like it’s a class lecture. If you can’t show it with action, do not spell it out like a lecture. That’s not filmic! That’s boring. They should have known that they were doomed when they couldn’t storyboard that scene any better. It feels like Scorcese just gave up directing half way through and then slapped an ending on top of the boring section that follows through illustrating all the stuff they talked about before. Terrible. Just terrible. DiCaprio is good through all of this and I don’t usually like him. And then the very last scene has another twist. But by then it’s too late and you are begging for it to end. All the visually interesting parts have long since passed you by and you are in reality which is totally dull after the spooky, fascinating and trippy first half. A total let down.