Fails in every imaginable way

Rating: 3/10 (23 March 2008)

Again, we have another film where the preview was excellent and enticing, but the film itself was rubbish.
It was a Saturday morning, I was feeling the after effects of the night before and decided it was time for a bit of mindless fun and frights.
The opening forty minutes of 1408 was about 35 minutes too long. The final hour of the film was about 40 minutes too long. The end product was pathetic.
First and foremost, this film was supposed to be a scary horror-esq film, but the only really worthwhile moment was when he stepped out onto the window ledge and tried to sidle over to the next room's window. Beyond that, the ghosts and creatures that haunt him are more reminiscent of things you'd see on a "Ghost Train" ride at an amusement park. Added to this, the film makers seems to run out of steam and ideas in an attempt to create the worst hotel room imaginable. For instance, the room suddenly became a freezer, nearly killing our hero. Yet there isn't anything particularly scary about an arctic hotel room. This was basically the main problem with the film: it simply was not scary most of time and the ideas seemed almost childish. Many of the attempts to get you to jump out of your seat seem to fail miserably.
The film then attempts to pull some sort of fancy looping, attempting to convince the audience that perhaps it was all a dream. But I'm afraid that I wasn't fooled for a minute.
Above all else, there was something very contrived about the way the room started to play on his personal life. We learn he has a daughter who died and a broken marriage resulted, so it somehow unimaginatively followed that the room would start playing on his person vulnerabilities by bringing up his daughter. There was something so predictable about it.
The ending was rather poor and by then I didn't care anyway. Probably the only positive was the perfectly cast Samuel L Jackson as the host of the haunted hotel. Beyond that, no positives that would make me recommend this film to others.