That name.

Rating: Null/10 (18 March 2002)

Donnie Darko is dark, strange and flawed. The film plays more like an episode of The X-Files or The Outer Limits than anything else, with an interesting premise and story that is needlessly drawn out to full film length. Therefore, we get characters that are nominal to the story appearing only to add more screen time to the film. For instance, Drew Barrymore's and Patrick Swayze's characters are so irrelevant to the plot, their big name attraction only serves to deter from rather than help the plot of the film.

Donnie Darko, played well by Jake Gyllenhaal, is a high school kid suffering from auditory and visual hallucinations, somnambulism, indifference, teenage angst, etc. In other words, he's a mess. He also has an invisible friend named Frank, a twisted-looking rabbit, who tells him at the beginning of the film that he has certain amount of days and time left before the world will end. He also commands Donnie to do certain deeds before that time, all of them involving illegal activities that I won't describe here. And then we have all the rest of the characters who seemingly exist only to provide as "fillers" in the film , neither helping nor adding anything of value to the core of the story.
That's a shame, because the story itself is suspenseful, ominous and engaging. It's not a big-budget film, and I also liked that aspect of it. Still, Donnie Darko is not a bad film. 7/10.