I want my money back

Rating: 1/10 (2 April 2002)

It's too bad the IMDB doesn't award votes of zero for a film. Donnie Darko would be a candidate for the goose egg.
I've sat through many a bad film -- Gummo comes to mind -- or challenging films from the Goddard canon. But Donnie Darko was so awful that I nearly shut it off 30 minutes in, and I only stuck around because there was *one* funny scene that referenced the Smurfs. I'm now regretting that decision.
The plot, if you can call it that, is like Harvey meets Amelie on a dimly-lit back street. Set in 1988, Donnie Darko is about a high-school kid who's being haunted by visions of an ugly bunny rabbit who visits him at weird hours of the night. The rabbit, who really looks like a guy in a bad Easter costume, saves Donnie's life one day from being crushed to death by a wayward jet engine that falls out of the sky. The bunny rabbit then convinces Donnie that the world's going to end in less than a month, which means Mr. Darko has to go out and vandalize his school or the homes of no-gooders all in the name of ... well, I'm not entire sure.
Nothing makes sense in Donnie Darko. There's all sorts of allegories to the 1988 U.S. election that don't pay off. The ending is muddled and, by that time, you'll have stopped caring why nothing makes sense. Then there's these bizarre extended musical sequences set to horrible '80s music that pop up for no apparent reason other than to possibly pad the running time.
But you really don't want to get me started on the dialogue and the acting. Drew Barrymore is *horrible* as an English teacher, and seems to be reading her lines off a TelePrompter. Some of the high school bullies look spaced out on drugs, and *aren't* threatening or menacing at all. And I have absolutely zero idea what Gretchen, the token romantic interest, sees in our (anti)-hero. Note to screenwriter: "He's weird" doesn't cut it.
Then there's the god-awful CGI, which liberally borrows special effects last seen in *The Abyss*.
There's only one good decent thing I can say about this movie, aside from the aforementioned Smurf scene: the kid who plays Donnie actually does a good job. He almost makes the whole thing watchable -- until the utterly confusing ending cancels it out. Sometimes, aping David Lynch is *not* a good thing.
I don't get how so many people have been duped by this waste of time. Personally, I want my $5 in rental fees back. Zero out of 10.