Donnie Darko: Pretentiousness Personified

Rating: 1/10 (22 October 2007)

Time and again I read the comments of other people on IMDb on films I have found to be truly awful - just to see what other people think of them - only to find the majority of them describing the film in question as wonderful, brilliant, awe-inspiring etc. Again, the comments I have found on "Donnie Darko" are no exception to this general rule.
My wife and I have only just watched "Donnie Darko" on DVD and were furious in the extreme at having wasted over two hours of our time on this annoying and frustrating rubbish that "cleverly" tried to be so-called "art". We absolutely abhor films that start off from a certain premise, and then at the end the viewer is confronted with the nasty trick of, "Ho, ho, this just didn't happen this way at all!".
So that, in "Donnie Darko", the sleep-walking character of Donnie Darko - played by the epitome of the somnambulist actor of all time in all his varied film roles, Jake Gyllenhaal - is shown to have escaped the falling jet engine on his bedroom (occurring at the beginning of the film) because the "bunny rabbit" by the name of "Frank" had mysteriously got him out of the house, only for the film to end with the very fact of the jet engine killing D. D. in his bedroom.
Certainly, this kind of "twist" between a film's starting "reality" and concluding "unreality" has been seen many times before, most notably in the Bruce Willis masterpiece, "The Sixth Sense". There, though, it works absolutely brilliantly, so much so that every time I watch the film it leaves me very disturbed and upset.
But not this time. We were both angry with ourselves for watching this piece of utter pretentious nonsense, and straightaway the DVD ended up in our rubbish bin where it truly belonged.