Overall Rating
  Awesome: 29.91%
Worth A Look: 35.04%
Average: 16.24%
Pretty Bad: 5.98%
Total Crap: 12.82%
5 reviews, 87 user ratings
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| Mothman Prophecies, The |
by Scott Weinberg
"The Weinberg Prophecy: You'll nod off halfway through this one."
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Skipping clumsily between 'creepily interesting' and 'downright boring', Mark Pellington's schizophrenic The Mothman Propecies is a solid 100-minute thriller. Unfortunately, the actual running time is well over 2 hours.I'm predicting big things for young director Mark Pellington. As evidenced in his two big-budget movies, this one and the underrated Arlington Rd., this is a director who has a distinctive style, has a knack for extracting solid performances and provokes his audience as much as he entertains. Having given the proper credit, I must counter by saying that the flaws in The Mothman Prophecies come mainly from its rambling, scattershot and overall unsatisfying screenplay.
Most of the jolts go like this:
"What do you mean you just talked to Pete? He's been dead for 12 days!"
and
"I just drove 400 miles in one hour? Weird!"
and
"There's no way you just saw my wife! She's been dead for 2 years!"
You get the picture. Plot holes are everywhere, several sequences feel like remakes of scenes from 25 minutes earlier, and the half-handed attempts at explaining the psychological phenomena are lazy at best. (It's not fair for a screenwriter to have his characters say "There IS no explanation", as it makes the audience all itchy and annoyed.)
Based on the book by John Keel, this movie tells the tale of Washington Post journalist John Klein and his efforts to find meaning among all the unsettling precognitions he's been experiencing. Two years after the tragic death of his young wife, Klein finds himself curiously driving into Point Pleasant, West Virginia. It's in this sleepy little burg that John hopes to discover the mysteries behind his wife's death. Suffice to say that things get considerably more complicated than that.
It seems that several of Point Pleasant's citizens have been seeing visions, lights, signs, harbingers, etc. If it's potentially creepy and basically unexplained, these poor folks have gone through it. John's explorations cause him to cross paths with a comely policewoman, a beleaguered backwood couple and several other confused individuals. As far as I could tell, the "Mothman" is an entity that (for one reason or another) informs random people of future events, only the reports come out quite jumbled. That such a compelling concept is steeped amidst several uninteresting plot turns is among this movie's biggest disappointments.
Richard Gere plays John Klein in full-on "Richard Gere Mode", while the rest of the cast acquit themselves quite nicely. Though a bit miscast, Laura Linney (Congo) delivers a solid performance, and Will Patton (Armageddon) is as entertaining as ever. The movie's best performance is (irritatingly) its smallest, with Alan Bates (Gosford Park) taking full command of his every scene. Also quite impressive is the lovely Debra Messing as Klein's ill-fated spouse. If you're familiar with this actress mainly from TV's Will & Grace, you'll be pleasantly surprised at her acting chops in this one.
Pellington's camera is seemingly always on the lookout for the cleverest way to depict the action, and The Mothman Prophecies is full of quirky little touches that easily showcase the director's burgeoning directorial skills. In the movie's more intense momemts, The Mothman Prophecies threatens to become a GREAT film, yet these moments are uniformly followed by sequences both ponderous and dull.
Worth seeing for fans of Gere and Pellington, this one seems destined to become an 'acquired taste'. Despite its attempts at a half-hearted twist ending, the best moments in The Mothman Prophecies (aside from a killer finalé) come early on. In this case, the journey was infinitely more involving than the destination.Beware of the horror flick that purports to be based on "actual events", because nothing REALLY thrilling ever happens in "actual events". That's why we go to the movies. While it's definitely not an AWFUL film, The Mothman Prophecies could have been greatly improved by a more heartless editor and a lot more intensity.
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=1882&reviewer=128
originally posted: 01/25/02 16:59:26
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USA
25-Jan-2002 (PG-13)
UK
N/A
Australia
23-May-2002
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