Better Off Renting Angel Heart Again... or 12 Monkeys!

Rating: 5/10 (23 August 1999)

Yet another great script idea blurred and ultimately mangled by p**s-poor direction. I was thrust into skepticism even during the initial shooting sequence. Was I being too cynical or overly probing when I balked at the New Kid On The Block in the bathroom? Who sought vengeance on Bruce Willis, the child shrink who "failed" him by managing to convince him that the dead people he saw walking around all the time were merely outgrowths of stress sprouting from issues surrounding his parents' divorce? Who happened, after X years of torment by these wandering spirits, to break into Bruce Willis's house on the very night he was commended by the city for his work with children? Commended with a plaque shiny enough to have filmed the scene prior almost entirely in its reflective surface?
Maybe I was. But after numerous scenes in which every line uttered by every character (and I use the term loosely) was so clearly meant to advance the plot (used even more loosely) that a kindly old narrator such as Burl Ives (or his claymation counterpart) might as well have been reading the whole movie off a clipboard, I found it difficult to sustain my disbelief. Or interest, for that matter. Yes, there were a few effective (but cheap) scares, and the ending was quite cool. But hardly a payoff worthy of having to endure a child actor as insistently bad as any I've ever seen, a mother who seemed to be peering at cue cards over her son's shoulder, and the incomprehensible stoicism of poor Bruce Willis, way out of his (fifth) element, rolling out every stupid child psychology trick save pulling a coin from behind the kid's ear (there is a coin trick, though), all of which are inexplicably and immediately effective. If only it were that easy to pull one over on the audience... oh, wait, it is. That this film has received so many positive reviews is baffling.
Olivia Williams is very easy on the eyes (but has nothing to work with as obligatory wife-person), and there were some lovely ironies available, notably in the mutual confession scene in the hospital after the kid has his pseudo-seizure, but the film attempts to drive home its points like a careless carpenter with a throbbing thumb. I'm extremely weary of films that collapse when I pay too much attention to them, and likewise wary of those who suggest that in order to enjoy these films I should not pay so much attention.
3 out of 10.