Starts off well, but goes downhill

Rating: 6/10 (2 August 2006)

Sleepwalking daughter (Jodelle Ferland) wanders off from her mother, Rose (Radha Mitchell) in an abandoned ghost town known as Silent Hill. While Rose's husband (Sean Bean) searches fruitlessly for her, she must put up with a police officer (Laurie Holden), who suspects her of kidnapping, the crazed mother (Deborah Kara Unger) of a "witch", and the variety of repugnant mutants that inhabit the town.
I had absolutely now idea what to expect when I went in to this movie. I didn't know what the video game was about and I didn't know the plot of the movie. All I wanted was two hours of shocks and scares. To my disappointment, Silent Hill is one of the forgettable films of 2006, and definitely not scary to anyone over 13. Director Christophe Gans tries his best to create a sense of foreboding and to some extent, the atmosphere he builds up works - but the payoff just isn't there. While some scenes in "Hill" are truly disgusting and gruesome, the film is far from scary.
The good points of the film are the sweet score, some smooth, stylized camera-work, absolutely brilliant settings and an unpredictable and very confusing plot. The bad points include the pretty weak acting overall, a brutally corny script, and the lack of any really frightening scenes. The CGI mutants are hideous enough to look at, but too cartoonish in their digital appearance to feel like they're really there. They look like just that: CGI mutants, straight out of a video game.
Sean Bean, by far the best actor out of the cast, has nothing to do, and he wanders around as aimlessly as his character in the film. The rest of the cast is just passable although their dialogue sometimes becomes eye-rollingly cheesy.
Maybe I'm just too jaded. I bet there are many 13-15-year olds who will sneak into the theatre and have a scary good time, but any true horror fan will most likely leave unaffected by Hill's violent CGI mayhem. I can only recommend this movie to people around 12-14. That's not to say Silent Hill is a waste of time. It's just a huge disappointment.(r#47)