Inconsequential Pileup, Misleading Advertising and Scorsese as a Technician but not Artist

Rating: Null/10 (13 April 2011)

First reason for giving this film 1 is misleading advertising. It's declared as a drama about a US Marshal investigating a disappearance case but it's actually a psycho horror movie far away from a case investigation drama by any standard and that is completely different and not particularly respected genre. So, unless you actually like psycho horror genre (with creeps and disfigured faces) you might as well save yourself time and grief.
A greedy rookie looking for a quick score might be forgiven for cheating but for experienced director like Scorsese it's undignified gimmick persisted as a false description here on IMDb which is supposed to be truthful.
Second reason is that it leaks water left and right and wastes enormous time to drag viewers through completely inconsequential pileup of scenes as if director couldn't make up his mind what to do or couldn't bear to give up scenes just because he had them. That's a trait of a technician who just collects scenes, not an artist who does scenes with a goal. Again, forgivable for a rookie but not for Scorsese.
Writing something negative about Martin Scorsese is risky business these days but understanding what, how and why went wrong with this film may help to explain why after raising to early prominence with "Taxi Driver" Scorsese never managed to become the artistic force that people expected and rooted for him to be.
He doesn't seem to know where to stop when faced with inconsequential pileup of anything or to say no to a horror affectation in a film that's not declared as horror. Reaching for a horror affectation is always the sing of a director lost, and the place of easy slippage for a director trying to do a film noir and forgetting the line that can never be crossed.
This problem becomes very clear in this since Scorsese started with a mystery novel which is choke full of pointless red herrings but the novel can't be blamed since for it's genre that's normal. People don't buy these books for artistic value but to spend disproportionate time reading throw-away red herrings.
Director is the one who bears the responsibility for taking apart both the book and the leaky scrip which forgot the nature of the film as a form, reduce clutter and polish up till he has a coherent form. That is where the principal failure of Scorsese lies - not expending any artistic effort and acting as a technician greedy for more and more scenes which lead nowhere.
This is again a thing that a rookie on a thin budget can be forgiven for but not Scorsese who is expected to refuse a script when it's too leaky to be worth fixing and is above all expected to have his films honestly declared as belonging to a genre they actually belong to.
Mind you that this is not an academic point - when a film is as leaky as this one that destroys aspects that could have worked well. Clear example is how it ruined otherwise excellent concept of nested dreams.
It uses conceptual structure of a nested dream that Nolan used with great brilliance in "Inception" and the two films were produced during roughly the same time frame but with Scorsese starting and finishing first and DiCaprio playing in both. So it's fair to assume that the nested dream concept was the fashion of the season and that Nolan was a copy-cat so to speak.
Nolan however made the nested dream concept fully consequential and held the whole structure of his film tight and fully functional. At the same time Scorsese allowed it to disintegrate into inconsequential mess of not even red herrings but completely sideways fluff. In hindsight one can say that Nolan saved the concept of nested dreams from being ruined forever by Scorsese's careless use.
It's hard to say if this is the worst film in Scorsese's opus, because fragments do have technical quality if considered in isolation, but it is the most disingenuous and incoherent.