Horror
maven Sam Raimi's directorial flair and Christopher Young's
fiddle-flecked score aren't enough to prop up this supernatural
Confederate corpse that comes up short in script and satisfaction.
It's a stale Southern-fried Agatha Christie/Perry Mason-Dixon
cross-breed -- the kind where just about everyone masquerades with a
guilty face. In this case, it's the writers, Slingblade's
Billy Bob Thornton and his erstwhile partner Tom Epperson, who paint
their gothic mystery drama with broad stereotypes and a horrifyingly
predictable ending. I see dead box office.
Raimi
struck out with his last effort, the baseball-themed For the Love of the Game featuring Kevin Costner, although he won
over non-traditional fans with 1998's A
Simple Plan, a wintry mood piece with small town, slow-witted
similarities to his current fare. I'm one of the small group that
liked his western The Quick
and the Dead (especially that one incredible shot when sunlight
beams through a bullet hole in Gene Hackman's body), which broke him
away from his Darkman/Army of
Darkness/Evil Dead cult schlock genre works. The Gift is technically taut but thematically narrow-minded, its
cast stuck in one-dimensional characters culled from a dime-novel.
At
least the talented Ms. Cate Blanchett commands your attention as the
clear-eyed, sweetly simple psychic in the bayou backwater town of
Brixton (i.e., Savannah, Georgia). She's aglow with the same regal
radiance that crowned Elizabeth.
More recently you probably didn't recognize her as she dropped her
native Australian accent for New York nasal in the guise of the Long
Island wife of John Cusack in Pushing
Tin. The subtleties of the South and three fatherless boys offer
her this latest challenge, and even if the film fails to inspire,
Blanchett provides suitable eye candy over its darkened landscape.
As single mom Annie Wilson, she's not in the mood for trouble, but
that's just what she's dealing, in the form of cards affixed with
six-pointed stars, squares, circles, and three wavy lines. The young
widow's innocent inability to present the proper poker face makes
for a parade of nasty encounters among the local bottom-dwellers.
Such
numb-skulled, paper-thin denizens include Donnie and Valerie
Barksdale (Keanu Reeves and Hilary Swank). Reeves' wife-beating and
wife-cheating redneck bully treads on the rotten ground he
previously explored in The Watcher, while Swank, in the first appearance on the big screen
since her Academy Award winning role in Boys
Don't Cry, suffers his abuses as the white-trash spouse, a
pseudo-deceitful bitch whose skin-tight pants and high heels beg for
his misguided attention. Down the road apiece, on the other side of
the tracks, is Dawson Creek's Katie Holmes as trampish socialite Jessica King.
Daddy's a big wig at the country club, unaware that his sweet young
daughter's busy screwing around with most of the town's menfolk,
despite an impending marriage to school principal Wayne Collins
(Greg Kinnear), a mild-mannered heartthrob. As for the friendly
neighborhood auto mechanic, Giovanni Ribisi is Hollywood's surefire
answer to casting calls for the mentally disoriented and borderline
psychotic. His sunken-eyed Buddy Cole fits the bill for did he or
didn't he when one of the locals getting plucked and plundered. Then
there is David Duncan (Gary Cole), the district attorney who charges
into a media-grabbing murder case with his own secret. And Sheriff
Pearl Johnson (J.K. Simmons) comes off as the local law authority
more concerned with missing pastries than bodies.
But
it's debilitating when the audience has to suffer through trite
dialogue, enduring such satanic banter as "Messing with the
devil's gonna get you burned" or the omniscient "Look's
like there's a storm a'comin'." When the screenplay's too busy
pointing fingers or guns -- the few spectators watching with me
erupting in unintended laughter when Donnie and Buddy square off in
a roadside tussle -- Raimi stirs up the cinematic gumbo with aural
and visual effects, exhorting clouds to swirl by in darkened frenzy,
lightning to pierce the damp night, and frogs and crickets to scream
out in unified delirium.