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Liam Carey reviews

The Gift

Distributed by

Warner Brothers

On paper, The Gift - co-written by Billy Bob Thornton, directed by Sam Raimi and starring a host of top talent - really ought to be a surefire success. Somehow though, this supernatural Smalltown murder mystery never quite rises above the humdrum or the cliched. Nothing in the movie gels the way it might be expected to, the tension and chills also failing to raise the overall tempo above an overwhelmingly pedestrian level.

Given the presence of Cate Blanchett in this film's central role, and her continual involvement in the unfolding dirge, it's all the more unexpected. Blanchett has always been a luminous, fascinating actress, capable of playing wildly differing characters with great - almost effortless - conviction. Here, she even manages to hold the attention with compelling intensity, yet the material ultimately lets her - and everyone else - down badly.

The Gift is a reference to the extra-sensory powers which she has inherited from her ancestors, and which have created suspicion, mistrust and hostility towards her from local townsfolk. It's an unoriginal scenario, and the stereotypical people who inhabit this hicksville of a place are sketchily-written and often miscast. A thriller, especially one billed as a psychological thriller, needs a sharpness... a sense of urgency punctuating the escalating unease. It's no use having a plot so predictable that, 20 minutes from the end, the question of whodunnit is blindingly obvious. When you consider the protagonist franctically (so they hope) trying to solve the mystery has psychic abilities, the fact she is still in the dark as to the killer's identity makes a mockery of the whole sorry business.

Provocative subjects are raised - among them child abuse, wife-beating and the dangers of witchcraft - and much of the action is shot in "cinema verite" style, with little sonic embellishment or sugar coating. Unfortunately, the result is chronically muddled, and occasionally incomprehensible. None of the various narrative strands are ever satisfyingly explored or resolved.

Raimi, by all accounts, used to be an acclaimed horror film director with some pizzazz. The Evil Dead remains a cult classic. How far away that must seem now, as The Gift is comprehensively bereft of genuine flair or momentum. There is a complete absence of personality in his leaden direction, a lack of cohesion or purpose to the interminable opening half-hour.

At its core, The Gift is no more than a bog-standard "young woman goes missing under suspicious circumstances" tale, with the added dimension of events being connected to, and seen through, a main character who is haunted by nightmarish visions. It's all too contrived, and too derivative, to engage or involve. Audiences need substantially more these days, they've literally seen it all before. The only route to avoiding this kind of embarassingly flat end-product is to take the post-modern approach, or else splatter as many brain-frazzling special effects into the mix as possible.

Supporting players of the calibre of Kim Dickens and Hilary Swank are criminally under-used and frankly wasted on such mediocre fare. Reeves lives up to his reputation and offers a typical, magnificently wooden performance as an abusive redneck thug. The always intruiging Ribisi's damaged mechanic offers a glimpse of something electrifying, but soon descends into the mire as well. Holmes meanwhile, impossibly cute in Dawson's Creek, Go! and Teaching Mrs Tingle, attempts to move away from the goody-two-shoes student schtick. Yet for all her beauty and promise, the promiscuous sex-bomb she plays here doesn't quite ring true, not that she's given an awful lot of opportunity to prove whether she really is capable of pulling it off. Kinnear, having impressed so often in previous outings (Nurse Betty, Mystery Men, As Good As It Gets) is similarly blighted by the lacklustre script that provides dead giveaways at every turn.

The best advice for all concerned with this damp squib would be to forget The Gift as quickly as possible, and move on. Perhaps only Blanchett is likely to feel remotely comfortable with this film appearing on her CV, producing as she does another excellent lesson in classy, subtle, sexy and unorthodoxly charismatic acting.

Quite often the DVD release of a lacklustre film is stuffed with supplemental material, possibly to mask the failings of the actual movie. The Gift, however, offers no such sweeteners. A bog-standard featurette lasting 10 minutes is typically throwaway and insubstantial, while the interviews follow the same route... how can 15 minutes ever be enough for Raimi, Blanchett, Kinnear Reeves, Ribisi and Swank to say anything beyond the usual platitudes?

TV and Radio spots are just more fluff (was there ever a less essential extra feature than 30-second ads?), while the lack of any other languages or subtitle options other than English is another blemish. At least the sound and picture are okay, although the dialogue is a little on the quiet side and might necessitate turning up the volume to almost double the norm. Oh, and the packaging mis-spells Blanchett's first name as "Kate". Whoops.

Not the greatest exponent of the format, then.

FILM CONTENT
PICTURE QUALITY
SOUND QUALITY
EXTRAS


OVERALL

Review copyright © Liam Carey, 2002.

E-mail Liam Carey

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