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Overall Rating
  Awesome: 6.98%
Worth A Look: 17.44%
Average: 23.26%
Pretty Bad: 18.6%
Total Crap: 33.72%
7 reviews, 44 user ratings
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| Forgotten, The |
by Lybarger
"The Sixth Nonsense"
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Watching The Forgotten is about like listening to a five-year-old telling a joke. You get a sense that the artist is pleased with the content. In the case of kids, they tend to crack up before delivering the punch line, leaving the listener befuddled.The makers of The Forgotten, screenwriter Gerald Di Pego (the annoyingly pretentious and dull Instinct) and director Joseph Ruben (Sleeping with the Media), have their characters screaming and running for their lives, and it becomes exceedingly hard to figure out or even care why.
Julianne Moore leads an overqualified cast as a mother named Telly, who after a year has struggled with the death of her son Sam.
When the lad's picture starts mysteriously fading from family portraits, her husband Jim (Anthony Edwards) and her psychiatrist (Gary Sinise) inform her that Sam was actually stillborn and that all of her memories are delusions.
Telly's maternal instincts tell her differently, and she discovers another "former" parent named Ash (Dominic West) who has forgotten having a child that Telly clearly remembers.
In their attempts to surprise or jolt audiences, Ruben and Di Pego manage to make the film more nonsensical as it progresses. Even when The Forgotten grinds to a halt, the conclusion feels more arbitrary than cathartic. As a character study, The Forgotten could have been really affecting because little is scarier that the notion of not being able to trust one's own memories or sanity.
Instead Ruben and Di Pego throw in car chases, political conspiracies and even hints of the supernatural to mix. It's almost as if they got bored after a realizing the setup and patched together whatever elements came to mind. None of these ideas blend well, and gradually the attempts at jolting the audience only induce giggles.
Superfluous special effects don’t help. As people start to zoom toward the heavens as if propelled by a vacuum cleaner, it's hard not to wish such a force could deliver a person from the theater.
A plot shift that works or a twist ending that actually shocks should be treasured because such developments are tricky to pull off. As anyone who's seen M. Night Shyamalan's movies can tell you, for every The Sixth Sense ending, there are dozens of conclusions like the one to Signs. Either the twist can be seen light years away, or the resolution is so forced that it feels more like a swindle than a surprise.
The latter is certainly the case here. With a consistent point of view from Moore's character, it would have been easier to identify with her confusion. Instead, we occasionally see the story from an outside perspective, which undermines the logic of the later developments. When weird things start happening, it seems too out of character to be convincing.
All of this muddle winds up obscuring the performers, making it harder to follow or empathize with them. Linus Roche (Priest) is stuck playing a character dubbed (I’m not making this up) “Friendly Man,” and Alfre Woodard has little to do but spout Jack Webb-isms as a cop.It’s interesting that the comedy Shaun of the Dead, which also opens in the U.S. this week, has more genuine chills than this straight thriller, and the laughs it elicits are intentional. The Forgotten sadly lives up to its name.
link directly to this review at https://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=10796&reviewer=382
originally posted: 09/25/04 10:02:34
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USA
24-Sep-2004 (PG-13)
DVD: 18-Jan-2005
UK
N/A
Australia
04-Nov-2004
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