Silent Hill not quite up to snuff.

Rating: 7/10 (22 April 2006)

This is one of the few films that I have trouble saying it is either definitively awesome or totally crappy. Though for writing sake Ill say it leans towards crappy.
Silent Hill follows the desperate search of a mother for her sleep walking daughter, whom she has (they give a fairly lame excuse for it) taken to the ghost town of silent hill.
Of course girl goes missing after a minor car accident and we watch desperate Momma try and figure out where she is and what exactly happened in this town to make it so freakishly twisted.
And let me tell you thats where the movie shines is the twisted. Visually this movie is very scary, the varied denizens of the town and all its twisting realities are the stuff of true nightmares. Unfortunately so are parts of the script.
My real problem with Silent Hill is that it has a lot of potential story wise but some major plot holes really screw it over. The reason for the towns burning is eventually given but not a very clear way. The origins of the evil are again mentioned but not really expounded on. And the origins of Momma's little girl are fairly hard to believe (as is the whole who is the her real father question, something that is never answered). Some of the dialogue is a tad cheesy and a fair amount of the directing could use work (The female cop wearing stereotypical shades at night is minor but really annoying when I think about it...I mean c'mon who wears sunglasses at midnight?) The final scenes of the film are a pretty big let down. I came away wondering if the mother (and symbolically the forces of good) really did win, and what exactly was going on.
Silent Hill definitely is better than most video game to movie adaptations but it still has a long ways to go before it equals far better films in this genre. I give it a C-