Uggh... big disappointment

Rating: 5/10 (12 February 2008)

I was sort of intrigued by the premise of this movie, along with the photos of a greasy, scary looking Jim Carrey (I would still love to see him as a psychopath in a movie - beneath that nutty kid persona, there's obviously a pretty scary guy in there somewhere, just like Adam Sandler.)
Joel Schumacher's "style" was the first big mistake - a movie like this needs to clearly set up a reality, and then upend it. This is like "Jacob's Ladder" meets a soft core 1980's George Michael video ("I want your sex" comes to mind - maybe Schumacher directed that too) from the word go. I found myself laughing out loud at much of the "dream" stuff. Then there's the dog - supposedly an "evil" creepy dog - which comes across as a dog from a McDonald's commercial. I mean, were all the Dobermans being used for the Omen remake??
So then the movie takes forever to get going, but finally gets a bit interesting in the middle (maybe 10-15 minutes), then... oh man, all downhill from there. Not thrilling, just confusing. Not scary, just alternating funny (Jim Carrey's overacting gets more funny here than his comedy roles) and predictable.
******* MAJOR SPOILER FOLLOWS **********
Then it all unravels for that ending. And we have a scene where VIrginia Madsen has (apparently - the story is very muddled at this point) just found out her husband is a psychotic murderer, and she says something like "that's okay honey, you weren't a bad person that turned good, you were a sick person that got better." Now, I'm thinking, okay, she's actually the bad guy, she used a mentally ill guy as the fall guy. Because no one in their RIGHT MIND would say that - but there was no further twist, so she meant every word!
Then we get this cuddly Jim sitting in prison with VO that's like "Because I turned myself in, I'll probably get parole, and return to a normal life." Yeah, when your 12 year old kid is 50, my friend...
So why did Virginia Madsen buy him the dreaded book in the first place? At what point did she know his murderous secret - has she always known, or did she just find out? If she just find out, why in God's name is she digging up the remains of his victim? Why is it played as sort of okay that Jim murders the woman just because she has a knife fetish?
I don't know, I was more disturbed by the choices of the filmmakers here than any of the characters in the movie. Who knows, in an industry that just in the last five years has made "normal" and sympathetic everyone from pedophiles to serial killers to war criminals to well, weed dealing suburban moms, maybe these guys are the lightweights.