Dragonfly
I just finished watching an older film, Dragonfly, with Kevin Costner and Kathy Bates and a lot of other people I can't remember right now.
I have this slight problem when reviewing films, I tend not to want to outright bash the people involved. I want to make excuses for them and such. But I just can't with this one.
It began kinda promising, and I almost actually cared about the characters. When the first "supernatural" event happens, I was actually getting into it. There's a kid that's flatlined, and suddenly he wakes up again. Spooky stuff.
Then the "too much, too fast, too small" syndrome starts. The point is to give the main character, whose name is Joe by the way, Emily's Joe, a mystery to unravel. He's got to follow the clues to figure out what his wife is trying to tell him.
But we get each clue hard and fast, and smaller characters run on and off the screen so quickly you're not sure they were even there. Some mystery, we don't even get a chance to try to figure it out because he's already got one thing down and is moving to the next.
Several reviewers compared it to The Mothman Prophecies. I wouldn't be that kind, because the Mothman Prophecies actually spooked me out a little. Of course, it could be because I live close enough to where that all happened.
Not to mention that the END of that movie is not really an up or down ending, it just is. It really felt like it was telling a true story, which the author felt it was. I'm sidetracked.
Dragonfly would have been a decent enough movie if the mystery unveiled something interesting, something neat or unexpected. I don't need a real twist really, but something.
Instead I get the most sentimental peice of crap I've ever seen put on my television. This is yet another one of those cases where I sat at the beginning of the movie going "I wonder if...nah, that would be too stupid!" and then it happened. This hasn't occurred since Urban Legend.
The ending is wretched, absolutly wretched. And Kevin Costner's reaction to said ending made me laugh so loud I scared my cat. People don't fall to their knees in real life, very rarely anyway. It's gotta be something dang good to make you fall to your knees, and while this revelation probably was pretty dang good for that character, he waited until about five minutes AFTER to fall over.
You think his brain couldn't keep up the pace, or did the editing just chop in a few too many seconds before they panned out? Because as it is, it's more like "*COMPLETLY SHOCKING ANNOUNCEMENT!*"
"My wife really did have something to say..."
*dramatic pause*
*more dramatic pausing*
*uncomfortable shifting from the extras*
"I SHALL FALL TO MY KNEES WITH A PAINED LOOK ON MY FACE!" *boom*
Then after all that junk, as if that wasn't enough to make your brain slowly start to leak out your ears, then we get a voiceover.
Note to directors of the world: voiceovers often equal the death of your respectability as a film. Esp. when said voiceovers only occur once. If you have a narrator, sure. If one character's thoughts play an important role in the film, sure.
But if you start the movie with a vo, or end it with one, you're just spoonfeeding the audience what you didn't have the time or skill as a storyteller to show them before your producers said "That's it, no more budget for you!"
To top it all off the VO was so ultimatly sappy that I had to brush my teeth afterwards. Guh.
You know, I let movies get by with an awful lot of things that probably couldn't happen. Heck, one of my favorite action flicks is Independance Day and we all know that it's completly unbelievable.
But our stunning and shocking finale in Dragonfly? That's just too far out even for me. It's so completly impossible that it makes me want to remind the writers that since they're getting paid, they probably should actually write something that doesn't sound like a fifth grader chanting "And they all lived happily ever after."
Bad movie. Only rent it if you've got time on your hands, and a friend to mock it with.
