A Wonderfully Made Film with a Flawed Premise

Rating: 5/10 (27 June 2008)

I want to say first that I really enjoyed this film...for the first 100 minutes, I thought it was the best I'd seen in years. My problem came with the ending. Although there is more explanation in the director's cut of "Donnie Darko", it does nothing to change the fact that this is three different films, but the ending picks one (science fiction) and renders the other two possibilities (a religious parable or a film about teenage angst) moot. That said, the acting is great, the writing is sharp, the editing is crisp...one of the best movies I've ever seen, and I understand why many younger people feel so passionately about it. I am a few years older than the director (I graduated high school in 1983) so I also appreciate the generational quality of the film.
My problem is, for the first 90 minutes of the film, I thought I was watching a really fantastic film about a young man who might be schizophrenic, with all that entailed for his family and friends. I began to wonder if the religious allegories might be more appropriate. Then, with the ending, it suddenly became nothing more than "Groundhog Day" or "Memento"...a better-than-average Twilight Zone "alternate universe story". I might have suspected this at the very beginning (when the jet engine should have killed Donnie) but thought this was a leading to something grander than the old "you have a month to get your life in order" scenario. I really did like it, but I have to give a strong negative for this cheated feeling I had after. This is what always results from a "deux ex machina", which Donnie actually mumbles at the end, his tormentor's knife at his throat. "What the f**k did you say?" the bully responds, and I groaned to Mr. Kelly, the director, "thanks for telling me NOW." Too bad. My complaints are much more eloquent detailed by Lawrence Person, who reviewed the film for Locus: http://www.locusmag.com/2003/Reviews/Person04_Darko.html