Director swallows game, drops turd

Rating: 1/10 (19 September 2007)

Stupidly violent; and apart from that, stupidly senseless; and then, as it wears on, stupidly pretentious in a garblemouthed, muddleheaded way. Or, in other words, like a video game. It's presumably made for gamers who get off on watching a child tortured and burned black, and then still living and still suffering: gamers who in watching her feel no pity or sorrow but think only: Wow, how cool. No wonder parents are down on these things.
This movieization of one of them has a single virtue: an eerie setting, or sequence of settings. But it's used by the director to show off how slick he is rather than to involve us, so that we never get a sense of being with the character, or of feeling with her, as she does what she does--which is to perform childishly repetitive actions such as running through street after street and building after building, meeting horror after horror and discovering the occasional clue or object that allows her to go on, all without rhyme or reason. Or, in other words, like a video game.
The actors are all pretty stiff, except for Alice Krige (who's certainly come down in the world since Chariots of Fire). But then the script was impossible to begin with, a product of the kind of mindless, heartless inexperience that is normally available only to children and the incurably childish. After this movie I'm prone to concur with Krige's character: a great big purge of the vicious may be just what this culture could do with, right about now.