One star. Rated R, for graphic nudity, rape, profanity, violence and highly disturbing images
By Derrick Bang
File this one under You’ve Got To Be Kidding.
Successful directors with runaway
egos are to be feared. Sooner or later, many of them succumb to self-indulgent,
often “long-nurtured” vanity projects that defy reason and emerge as
ludicrously bloated and self-indulgent. Some badly dent or even ruin careers;
others bankrupt studios.
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| Having been injured under suspicious circumstances, Lockhart (Dane DeHaan) decides to explore the mysterious sanitarium where none of the resident clients show any desire to leave. |
Steven Spielberg and George Lucas
stumbled badly, respectively, with 1941
and Howard the Duck. Andy and Lana
Wachowski blew their Matrix profits
on Speed Racer. Warren Beatty and
Dustin Hoffman still get taunted for Ishtar.
Eddie Murphy simply didn’t survive the fallout from The Adventures of Pluto Nash; director Renny Harlan suffered the
same fate, after Cutthroat Island.
Joseph L. Mankiewicz nearly took down Fox, with Cleopatra. Michael Cimino did
destroy United Artists, with Heaven’s
Gate.
There are many, many more ... and
to their company we now can add Gore Verbinski, the arrogant driving force
behind A Cure for Wellness.
Savvier Hollywood types should
have known better, given that Verbinski already demonstrated his tendency
toward wretched excess, with his recent update of The Lone Ranger. But the fact that he also helmed the first three
wildly successful Pirates of the
Caribbean installments apparently blinded Those In Charge to all the red
flags that should have been waving, from their first glimpse of this new
project’s misbegotten script.
I’ve a theory that “high-class
horror” is an oxymoron. Successfully scary movies, by their very nature, seem
to demand modest (even microscopic) budgets and the exhilarating momentum that
results from ground-level, guerrilla-style filmmaking; this has been true ever
since producer Val Lewton chaperoned his B-unit shockers for RKO Pictures, back
in the 1940s.
Commercial success for such
endeavors often is a happy surprise, rather than a specific goal.
But the moment an A-list
director, armed with a prestige budget, tries
to make a “serious” fright flick ... the resulting flop almost is inevitable.
See Exhibit A: Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining. Oh, it’s beautiful to look
at, and Kubrick gets points for instilling a creepy atmosphere ... but scary?
Hardly. Unintentionally funny, perhaps, but not terrifying; it’s too antiseptic
and soulless to induce nightmares.
Which brings us to A Cure for Wellness, and its ponderous,
insufferably calculated pretense of horror. Verbinski didn’t merely direct this
bloated travesty; he also co-wrote the original script with Justin Haythe, who
also collaborated on The Lone Ranger.
(Ahem.) The result gets off to a reasonably promising start — to be fair — but
quickly succumbs to laborious, overwrought theatrics and self-indulgently arty
tableaus.
