Someone is missing! Yeah. Scorsese.

Rating: 4/10 (14 March 2010)

I don't want to be cast asunder for words of heresy but is Martin Scorsese losing it? I only ask because Shutter Island is a load of old claptrap. The reviews I've read seem to be unable to make their minds up about it and IMDb seems to have lost its marbles a little by awarding it 8.1 and a place in the coveted all time Top 250. Surely not for long when common sense kicks in and people review it for what it is. A mess.
The movie really is a tram smash of ideas, styles and plotting. There's a neat twist in it but the utterly gratuitous Dachau strand to the movie is verging on the disgraceful. Parts of the film, certainly in the first half flashback to Di Capprio's experiences as an American GI liberating the Dachau concentration camp would be, you'd have thought, central to the plot. Not a bit of it. This strand hangs about meaningfully but without meaning. But that's the issue with this whole movie. It seems to want to inject meaning into a genre that really is just about entertainment. In doing so it lifts ideas from The Shining (some brilliantly), Silence of the Lambs (unconvincingly) and Hitchcock (at his worst) but they go nowhere. The cinematography flits about from the stunning, the scene in which DiCapprio and his young bride embrace during a fire is mesmerising, to the laughable - again DiCapprio is featured driving through a forest as a passenger with the Asylum's head warder in front of a blue-screened background that could have been shot in 1954 (the year the movie is set) - I suspect the latter was deliberate. If so it was another misguided idea.
The grading leaps about from 21st century hi-def to 1950's colour-noir and can't seem to decide what it is that it wants to be.
Dicapprio is unconvincing, so too Rufallo and Sir Ben Kingsley? Well, he is actually lampooning himself. Awful, truly awful.
Do not waste your money on this rubbish.
4 out of 10