PLANET SICK-BOY: http://www.sick-boy.com "We Put the SIN in Cinema" ©Copyright 2001 Planet Sick-Boy. All Rights Reserved.
If you charted the success of Sam Raimi's films on a graph, it would look like a big `W.' He started with the deliciously diabolical Evil Dead trilogy and the first Darkman film, only to follow them up with the extremely disappointing The Quick and the Dead. Raimi rebounded with the amazing A Simple Plan, but then, in a surprise to the director's fans, he decided to make a baseball film with Kevin Costner. Baseball? Kevin Costner? Fool me once (Bull Durham), shame on you. Fool me twice (Field of Dreams), shame on me. Fool me three times (For Love of the Game), and you'd better be wearing some kind of protection over your private parts.
Luckily, Raimi's latest film, a welcome return to the frightening fare that made him famous, is a big step in the right direction (his next project is the new Spider-Man film). The Gift is a nifty little thriller with a terrific cast full of recent Oscar winners and nominees, highlighted by a strong performance from Cate Blanchett (The Talented Mr. Ripley). Raimi proves he can still make with the creepy, but The Gift has the misfortune of following three of the best hair-raisers in quite some time (What Lies Beneath, The Sixth Sense and The Blair Witch Project). It's moody, atmospheric and, at times, downright unnerving, but The Gift just isn't in the same league.
The film's first five minutes establish Annie Wilson (Blanchett) as a recently widowed single mother with three children who live in the swampy Georgia burg of Brixton. She's a psychic, but more of a social worker to her customers than a carnival sideshow act. Annie prods people to call their doctors when she sees something in her tarot cards that indicate a medical problem. When one client (Hilary Swank, Boys Don't Cry) appears to have been beaten by her husband, Annie desperately tries to talk her into leaving the brute (Keanu Reeves, The Replacements). She is admired and respected by the people she helps and regarded as a bride of Satan/witch doctor/voodoo high priestess by the rest of the redneck town.
The Gift's story, co-written by Plan's Oscar-nominated actor Billy Bob Thornton and his One False Move and A Family Thing writing partner Tom Epperson, centers on the disappearance of a local girl named Jessica (Katie Holmes, Wonder Boys), who is engaged to the school principal (Greg Kinnear, Loser) and the daughter of a prominent businessman. Like Laura Palmer, Jessica was a hot, young nymphomaniac, doing pretty much every guy in Brixton, and eventually her nude carcass is discovered in a body of water. And, like Twin Peaks, Brixton is a town full of kooky suspects, each of which seem to have a motive in Jessica's murder. There's enough red herring here to fill Brixton's swamp.
Showing he's no stranger to the horror genre, Raimi fills The Gift with enough of Annie's unnerving flashes forward and backward to keep you on the edge of your seat. When you can feel the tension in an audience rise by a character simply drawing a bath, you know the director is doing something right. There is an awkward courtroom scene that feels out of place, but, for the most part, Raimi does a very good job keeping the somewhat clunky story moving along. The supporting cast does well (even Keanu) and seems to be having a pretty good time acting like hillbillies (look for Danny Elfman in a two-second cameo as a fiddle-playing hayseed). But The Gift is as much Blanchett's film to carry as it is Raimi's. And they both do a splendid job.
1:51 – R for adult language, violence, nudity, sexual content and some disturbing imagery
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews