Purgatorio

Rating: 3/10 (25 October 2008)

There is a scene in this movie in which a detective with supernatural powers uses a cat as a portal into Hell. I turned to my cat, Josefina, usually keen on the heuristics of these things, and asked if she found this in any way offensive. "Absolutely," she replied, turning her eyes from the screen in disgust. I gave it a good mulling-over that night, and the next day asked Josefina if she would have found it more acceptable if the portal to hell had been provided by another animal -- say, a dog -- but by that time the effects of my herbal psychotropics had worn off and, if Josefina answered, I didn't hear it.
Rachel Weisz plays a nice Catholic girl who's sister has apparently committed suicide. Weisz wants her buried in sacred ground, though, and she knows her sister would never kill herself. So she turns to Ke'anu Reeves, who has a reputation for knowing stuff about the supernatural.
It turns out he knows quite a lot. There are angels in Heaven and devils in Hell. The problem is they can't pass into the realm of the quotidian, so they send "half breeds," half-angels or half-devils, whose powers are limited to "whispering in our ears." Or so he says. Some of them resemble Harpies of Greek mythology or horrible deformed creatures out of "The Garden of Earthly Delights." Considering that they're limited to merely whispering, they do a good job of throwing bodies around and filling the streets with flapping bat-like wings.
I won't go on about it. The movie stinks. The dialog has lines like, "You're trying to buy your way into Heaven." And, "God is a kid with an ant farm." (Actually, come to think of it, that last one is pretty funny but I don't think it was meant to be.) The wind-up is that Reeves gives Weisz a crash course in the writer's version of how things work in this all-too-Christian cosmology and, expectably, it's all an excuse to hang a lot of computer-generated effects on. There are no surprises. The only thing that could have saved this trite piece of trash would have been the introduction of an Eskimo cosmology, with Hell consisting of seven levels of cold, and Sedna lording it over all.
Reeves, in poor fettle, rarely departs from his imitation of a mahogany idol. Rachel Weisz is more animated, a better actress, and beautiful in a not-quite Hollywood way.
My recommendation: Something is whispering in my ear. It's saying, "Don't bother."