Very breakable

Rating: Null/10 (15 February 2004)

This picture promises much, delivers very little, strong on style, very low on consistency, work of somebody who cannot tell the difference between form and essence. A depressing waste of time and of the talents of lots of wonderful actors, who perform well. Lots of darkness, plenty of noir atmosphere, collateral characters remain undeveloped, incidents in the story sometimes pinched from other films down the line of cinematic history and cinematography mainly an imitation of Hitchcock, which in itself would be no bad thing. (Witness the the mandatory following, slowly, by the camera of the hero from behind and the slow takes on this. Standard Hitch fare but serving what?)And it does not support the main story of the film. Water being the weak point of our superhero, we expect him to perish during the final swimming pool incident, but it doesn't happen of course, since the main character cannot be lost just like that. (If the director really wanted to do a Hitchcock on this, he, Bruce Willis could have been killed a la Psycho, which wouldn't have been all that inappropriate, but no, happy ending reckons and we lose one side of our friendly as a result of all-pervasive madness. To top it all, the final credits include documentary style reports on the further fate of our main characters, this pulls us back to quasi-reality, leaving the comic books world behind and us without a trace of suspending disbelief. Comics? Horror? Thriller? I suspect, the director himself has no idea where he was heading, and it shows. My advice to him: try his hand on some Bollywood romance and not to waste our time in the future...