Dreamcatcher | Review

In the silly and nightmarish world of Stephan King, Kasdan shows us why special people are special.

Maybe Johnny Knoxville and Stephen King are onto something? Get pummeled by a moving vehicle and get plenty of success out of it. Knoxville enjoyed some success with MTV and King made another bestseller. Apparently the folks at Warner Bros. had the intuition of providing Lawrence Kasdan, now in his third decade of filmmaking with a leap of faith opportunity to bring this difficult novel to the big-screen.

With familiar ties to the King repertoire of films, we have this band of four best friends acted by Thomas Jane (Magnolia), Jason Lee (Vanilla Sky), Damien Lewis (Band of Brothers (TV)), Timothy Oliphant (The Safety of Objects), now in their 30’s who honor a yearly tradition of going back to the cabin to knock back some bottles of Bud. A narrative shift takes us from their Stand by Me child experiences with a retarded child to their present day dead-end jobs with their hidden psychic-telepathic type abilities. Once they venture deep into the woods, that’s when the fun begins, or perhaps when the film gets a little messy as far as the visuals and the plot are concerned.

Dreamcatcher becomes a mystical supernatural gore fest with the added touch of some bizarre subplots that see the characters act like imbeciles. What baffled me the most is how unrecognizable that this film was in comparison to what the previews were proposing just about as recognizable as Donnie Wahlberg in take of a special child that looks like Gollum from The Lord of the Rings. Ultimately, the film turns into this screwball film, where military chiefs have their own bizarre agendas, where alien-like monsters a la Men in Black take on too much screen time and where the plot is structured around this silly chase about fighting off monsters, flashback frenzies and having the world saved by a retarded child. Especially, perplexing is how loads of talent ever got attached to this picture, what was Morgan Freeman thinking? Full scale wars come off as phony as the raspberry jelly monsters that munch away at humans. Up until the toilette seat sequence, the film had promise with this moody mystical suspense and the lush qualities of some beautifully realized cinematography from cinematographer John Seale with the innocent winter white colors, but the unexpected gore fest and crappy CGI (the animals running away in the forest was a nice touch) completely annihilates the promise of something worthwhile.

Perhaps it was the large amount of drugs that King took while recuperating that made the novel a potentially interesting project, unfortunately, the dreamed up production for Dreamcatcher fails to make me vision unlike my enthusiasm for the 14-minute The Animatrix short which preludes the film

Rating 1.5 stars