Movie Review: The Pianist

The Pianist (2002) 

Directed by Roman Polanski 

Written by Ronald Harwood 

Starring Adrien Brody, Thomas Kretschmann, Frank Finlay, Emilia Fox 

Release Date September 25th, 2002

Published September 24th, 2002

I have not enjoyed much of Roman Polanski's work. I found Rosemary's Baby to be somewhat tedious and his "comedy" Bitter Moon--with a naked Peter Coyote--is far more horrifying than anything in Rosemary's Baby. I put my preconceptions about Polanski aside as I sat down to watch his Oscar-nominated work The Pianist and found it to be a profound experience.

Adrien Brody, excellent in Spike Lee's highly underrated Summer Of Sam, is Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Jewish pianist who makes money playing Chopin on Warsaw radio. That is, until one day as he is playing, bombs begin to fall and the beginning of World War II overtakes Szpilman's life and that of his family, mother, father, brother, and two sisters. We do not learn much about Szpilman's family except that they are rather typical, loving, bickering, and loyal. As the Nazis overtake Poland, the family is forced from their middle class home and crowded into the small Warsaw ghetto.

The scenes in the ghetto near the beginning of the war are a shocking and brutal sight of people starving and dying in the streets and Jews turning against Jews. Even as some Jews die in the streets, Wladyslaw finds work playing piano for an affluent group of Jews who were able to hold onto enough of their wealth to eat in a cafe with little concern for their brethren who starve in the streets.

Of course, even the affluent would soon learn that no money can save you from blind hatred and, in a short time, all of Warsaw's Jews are loaded on trains and shipped off to the death camps. Wladyslaw escapes the fate of some six million Jews who died in the gas chambers, when a Jewish police officer pulls him off the train and sends him to hide in the ghetto. With help from the Polish resistance Szpilman, spends a good deal of the war hiding in silence behind locked doors. In a poignant and moving scene, Szpilman is hidden in a flat with a piano he cannot play but he mimics playing above the keys and hears the music in his mind.

Most of the film is simply Szpilman, moving from hiding place to hiding place while witnessing history happening around him. He witnesses the Warsaw ghetto uprising, where a group of Jews who were saved from the gas chamber so that they could be employed as laborers, stole guns and fought the Germans for three days before being out-manned and outgunned.

Near the end we do see Szpilman, play the piano again and it is a heartbreaking moment as he seems to have forgotten how to play but quickly picks it up again, and by the end has brought the piece a whole new meaning simply with the courage it took for him to play it. (I'm not familiar with piano music well enough to know what the piece was called but it was very beautiful.) Adrien Brody is truly outstanding in The Pianist.

The Pianist is a very good film. The film is very depressing at times and I mean life-force-sucking, what-point-is-there-to-life-when-there-is-such-cruelty-in-the-world depressing. The subject matter certainly indicates that. Nevertheless, this is a very well made drama about a man who wasn't heroic or necessarily brave. Most of the time he was just lucky. It is rather unique to see a story told from the perspective of a character who isn't an active participant but rather is merely a witness.

Movie Review: The Pink Panther

The Pink Panther (2006) 

Directed by Shawn Levy 

Written by Len Blum, Steve Martin 

Starring Steve Martin, Kevin Kline, Jean Reno, Emily Mortimer, Beyonce Knowles

Release Date February 10th, 2006

Published February 9th, 2006 

It’s not that Steve Martin is no longer a funny guy but, with his last few pictures, save for the exceptional romantic drama Shopgirl, he has really stunk up the joint. Cheaper By The Dozen 1 & 2 and his teaming with Queen Latifah in Bringing Down the House are vapid exercises in the most tired of cliches. The streak of joyless and mostly humorless comedies continues with The Pink Panther, a flailing cannibalization of the famous Peter Sellers film series.

Inspector Jaques Clouseau (Martin) is the model of ineptitude. As a gendarme of the French police, Clousseau's beat has long been the one place where he could do the least amount of damage. However, when the French national soccer coach (action star Jason Statham in a brief cameo) is murdered and his legendary pink panther diamond stolen from his dead body, it is Clousseau who is given the high-profile case.

The chief of French Police Dreyfus (Kevin Kline) chose Clouseau not for his investigatory skill, but rather to be the public face of the investigation. While Clouseau screws up in front of the cameras, Dreyfus and his team can solve the case behind the scenes and then take all the credit. To insure Clouseau does not screw up too badly, he is assigned a partner, Gendarme Gilbert Ponton (Jean Reno), who will attempt to keep Clouseau out of trouble.

Pop star Beyonce Knowles shows up as Xania, an international pop star, solely for the purposes of eye candy and for the soundtrack synergy. The pop star has no relevance to what there is of a plot. Poor Emily Mortimer, playing Clouseau's secretary, is stuck with the thankless role of his love interest, leaving Beyonce to merely provide the film with a marketable pop song for the soundtrack CD.

Once you accept that this is not much of a movie and more of a sketch-comedy exercise, the whole thing comes down to how funny these sketches are. And within that limited criteria, the results are quite mixed. The Pink Panther is exceptionally hit and miss. Certain scenes, such as Clouseau's introduction to Chief Inspector Dreyfuss, are laugh out loud funny. However, the sketches that don't work, like the attempts at bawdy adult humor or Clouseau's dirty-old-man infatuation with Xania, are far more uncomfortable than funny.

Director Shawn Levy is to the comedy genre what Uwe Boll is to sci fi. Okay, maybe he isn't quite that bad. Mr. Boll does set quite a standard, but for the relative ease of his chosen genre, the family comedy, Levy is unquestionably a hack. He can point the camera and capture what is in frame, but he has zero insight into how one scene should flow to the next. Levy has no sense of how to establish a comic or dramatic flow, no sense of storytelling and he has the visual sense of a blind squirrel.

I have not seen the original Pink Panther since the era of the large-form laser disc, so my memory of Peter Sellers as Clouseau is spotty at best. I know from experiencing other films of Director Blake Edwards, who directed Sellers in the original, that he is a far superior director to Shawn Levy, so it seems safe to assume that this new Pink Panther cannot match the original. Call that observation unfair or uninformed if you like, but it's inescapable that Levy is not a great director.

As for comparing Steve Martin and the legendary Mr. Sellers, I have to believe that Steve Martin certainly could match the talent of Peter Sellers. I have seen so much great work from Steve Martin, granted not much recently, that I have to believe him capable of being Peter Sellers' equal. In this film however, with this director, Martin is at a loss to bring this legendary character to life. Martin flails and falls with vigor but it's all for naught. Martin's goose was cooked the second Shawn Levy was named director.

So what, if anything, works in Pink Panther? For Steve Martin being, a complete failure at drawing laughs is impossible. Martin works very hard for what few laughs he gets in this dreadful film, but he does get a few and most come from his teaming with Jean Reno. In a better film, Martin and Reno could have riffed two complete funny performances but in Reno's sporadic screen-time, often cut short for more of Martin's dirty old man bit or the film's bizarre extended James Bond riff, they only have time for a few funny moments, the film's funniest moments.

Also, the teaming of Martin and Kevin Kline as Chief Inspector Dreyfus is inspired, but as with many of the ideas that went into this movie, the teaming is half-baked. Kline has only a handful of scenes with Martin, some very funny, some very much not. Like Martin's teaming with Reno, I watched Martin work with Kline and longed for a different, far better film to feature these two exceptionally talented actors.

The Pink Panther has been marketed as a family movie, so I should warn parents that the family movie tag was one forced upon the film. The Pink Panther was intended as an outrageous borderline R-rated comedy filled to overflow with prurient humor about Viagra, Beyonce Knowles' fine form, and a running gag about Martin and Emily Mortimer getting caught in compromising positions. The Viagra and the leering Clouseau's creepy eyeing of Knowles remain, as does the running gag about Martin and Mortimer, though I understand in much shorter form. These jokes do not belong in a supposed family movie.

Some might say if Sony, the studio that took over the prized property after purchasing MGM, mandated these changes that I should cut director Shawn Levy some slack. I would, if I thought these naughty scenes that are now either truncated or cut completely had the potential to be funny, but I don't see that. Watching what is left of the initial Pink Panther cut, I think Sony likely performed a salvage and rescue rather than the destruction of something bawdy and brilliant. 

Remakes are, more often than not, lazy cash grabs, and while there is little about Steve Martin's performance in Pink Panther that could be called lazy, there is an unquestionable stench of greed and the desire to cash in on a well known property. Worse yet, there is unshakable malaise around The Pink Panther that even Martin at his most manic cannot escape. Whether it comes from director Shawn Levy's poor direction or the general laziness of remakes is debatable.The Pi

Movie Review: The Possession of Hannah Grace

The Possession of Hannah Grace (2018)

Directed by Diederick Van Rooijen

Written by Brian Sieve 

Starring Shay Mitchell, Grey Damon, Kirby Johnson, Stana Katic 

Release Date November 30th, 2018 

Published November 29th, 2018 

The Possession of Hannah Grace stars Shay Mitchell, one of the stars of TV’s Pretty Little Liars, as Megan, a former police officer now working the graveyard shift at a Boston area morgue. Megan lost her partner tragically in a moment when Megan hesitated and didn’t shoot an armed suspect. The moment haunted her to the point of driving her toward alcoholism and abuse of prescription drugs. 

Today, Megan is still haunted by her partner’s death but she’s in AA and recovering. Megan’s sponsor, Lisa (Castle star Stana Katic), got her the morgue job and since she also works there, she keeps a close eye on her newly sober friend. Megan will be spending many long nights by herself in the creepy basement level morgue so having someone to occasionally look after Megan and make sure she hasn’t gone crazy isn’t a bad thing. 

Right off the bat The Possession of Hannah Grace strikes a creepy tone. We start the movie not with Megan but with the titular Hannah Grace who we never really meet. Hannah is possessed by an unnamed and very powerful demon. The demon murders one of the priests during its exorcism by impaling his skull on a cross. The special effect is bad but the impact is strong enough story-wise to indicate the power of the demon. 

The film then, quite interestingly, flashes a graphic that says 3 months later. We’re left to wonder, where is Hannah Grace now? Grace’s father murdered Grace at the end of the exorcism so where has her body been for 3 months? We will get a sense of that eventually but first a handsome and funny EMT, played by comedian Nick Thune, drops off Hannah’s body with Megan in the morgue and the strange occurrences begin to ramp up. 

The Possession of Hannah Grace comes from international director Diederik Van Roojien in his American feature debut. This director’s strengths do not lie with special effects which throughout The Possession of Hannah Grace are hilariously low grade. I mentioned the impaling early on as an example. That scene is cartoonishly, garishly bad with fuzzy images and poor acting combining to get a big laugh without intending to be funny in any way. 

The special effects, thankfully, are only a minor issue. The film makes up for the low grade effects with some top notch creepy sound design. The sound of bones cracking and snapping reminded me of the stomach turning work in the Saw movies. Sean Kennelly was the lead Foley artist on the movie and he deserves a lot of praise for nailing the creepiest sounds for the way Hannah Grace crackles and pops as she stalks the morgue or is being exorcised. 

If you have a weak stomach, the sound design and editing of The Possession of Hannah Grace could be triggering for you. The cracking of bones and the buzzing of flies are amped up to a disturbing degree. Actress Kirby Johnson is a special effect in her own right with the ways she’s able to contort her body and face in the creepiest possible manner. Johnson has a very limited part with minimal dialogue but she manages to make a strong physical impression. 

The Possession of Hannah Grace is not a movie you need to rush out to see in theaters. But, if you are looking for a streaming option once it makes the move to home video, probably in February or so, of 2019, you could do a lot worse than picking this demon based horror flick. The Possession of Hannah Grace is a solid effort in a tired genre that doesn’t recycle every cliche, just a sizable portion of them. 

Lower your standards and turn off your brain and you may find something to enjoy about The Possession of Hannah Grace which is in theaters nationwide this week. 

Movie Review: The Prestige

The Prestige (2006) 

Directed by Christopher Nolan 

Written by Jonathan and Christopher Nolan 

Starring Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Scarlett Johannson, Rebecca Hall, Andy Serkis 

Release Date October 20th, 2006 

Published October 19th, 2006 

Director Christopher Nolan's short career has been quite exceptional. His debut feature Following showed off a clever, if not accomplished young director. His follow-up Memento however, went beyond clever and into the realm of sheer directorial genius. Nolan came back to earth a little adapting the Icelandic thriller Insomnia for American audiences, showing that he is better off developing his own material.

Any questions about Nolan as a great director however, were answered when he took his first shot at the blockbuster brass ring, directing the franchise kickoff Batman Begins. One of the best films of 2005; Batman Begins raised the profile of Christopher Nolan and raised the stakes on his future success. His latest picture, The Prestige, became an instant buzzmaker with his involvement.

The Prestige, starring Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman as rival magicians, is a worthy effort for a director who is still feeling his oats as a major auteur. Clever and accessible, The Prestige is just smart enough to be a Christopher Nolan movie and just thrilling enough to be considered mainstream popcorn entertainment.

In turn of the century England magic is big business on the isle. Prestidigitation, legerdemain, and simple flim flammery are so popular that stages are eager to snap up the latest trickster. Into this world of con-men and showbiz folk, come two young men eager to learn the trade. Rupert (Hugh Jackman) and Alfred (Christian Bale) broke into the business together as audience plants for a hack magician (Mickey Jay in a minor cameo).

Their job is to wait patiently in the audience until volunteers are needed. They then eagerly head for the stage to take part in a very important trick. They are to tie the magicians assistant, Julia (Piper Perabo) who happens to be Rupert's wife, tightly and watch as she is lowered into a water tank and locked inside. The trick is that the magician will make her disappear.

The trick is pretty basic, the knots aren't very tight, the lock is tricked, Julia's escape is assured, though were something to go wrong the stage manager, Cutter (Michael Caine), is side stage with an axe. One night something goes horribly wrong. Unable to untie an overly elaborate knot, tied by Albert, Julia drowns. This begins a rivalry that is far more than professional jealousy.

Blaming Albert for his wife's death, Rupert saves his revenge for his ex-friend's first solo show as a magician. When Albert goes for his signature trick, catching a bullet from a tricked gun, he unfortunately picks out a disguised Rupert who fires a real bullet that takes two fingers from Albert's hand. The rivalry devolves from there to stealing tricks, trading women, one woman, Rupert's assistant Olivia (Scarlett Johannsen), and trying to one up each other with more and more complicated and dangerous illusions.

The magic of The Prestige however, is in the storytelling. Christopher Nolan, working from a script written by his brother Jonathan, toys with the time and space of his story in unique and often surprising ways. The movie begins with Albert in jail for having committed a murder. Then we are flashed back to Albert and Rupert's beginnings, as described above, and back and forth between the journals of both magicians, each written at the height of their rivalry.

The non-linear storytelling keeps us off balance for much of the picture, as in a good magicians trick; your looking one way as the trick happens the other way before being revealed and fooling you. The magic of The Prestige is not the staged theatrics which Nolan willingly explains and demonstrates, the magic is in the quiet misdirection and sleight of hand in the storytelling and direction.

Not all of The Prestige works. There are moments when you will easily be able to see what is coming next, the little sci fi twist late in the film is telegraphed, but the payoffs even on the most predictable twist are stunning and well crafted. The ending of The Prestige will confound some audiences but for those who have paid attention its a terrific jaw dropper.

Magic is big on the big screen this fall. The Illusionist starring Edward Norton has been one of the hottest indie features of the fall. Now The Prestige with an all star cast and a rising star director arrives with a whole lot of buzz and delivers a thrilling piece of magical storytelling. While the films shifting timeline can be confusing from time to time, it is essential to Nolan's way of telling this story. In demonstrating the magic of film-making, the ability to craft your own time and space, he honors real magic.

Adding to the prestige of this story is one sensational cast. Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale, Scarlett Johannsen and Michael Caine are exceptional, that you know. What you may not know though is just how brilliant David Bowie can be. Showing up almost unrecognizable as the legendary inventor Nikola Tesla, Bowie dazzles us with a deft turn that steals a few very good scenes.

Christopher Nolan is unlikely to win awards with movies like Batman Begins and The Prestige but that is certainly not his fault. Both films are sensational works that deserve award consideration. But, Nolan is fighting an academy mindset that is against anything that appeals too young or too mainstream. You can forget the academy ever giving a fair shake to something like Batman Begins, simply out of bias toward it's source material.

But most shockingly, even a period piece like The Prestige, no matter how ingenious and well crafted, will never earn awards attention. It's a thriller, with youth appeal, and a young, unproven cast. The academy may not love The Prestige, but you just might. This is simply a terrific film, who can't enjoy that.

Movie Review: The Prince and Me

The Prince and Me (2004)

Directed by Martha Coolidge 

Written by Jack Amiel, Michael Begler, Katherine Fugate 

Starring Julia Stiles, Luke Mably, Ben Miller, James Fox, Miranda Richardson

Release date April 2nd, 2004

Published April 1st, 2004 

I find it weirdly fascinating that to this day the film that so many women I know believe is the ultimate romantic fantasy is Pretty Woman. Pretty Woman is an awful movie about a sex worker who gets picked out of obscurity by a rich guy and the whole thing is played like the ultimate romantic fantasy, as of all sex workers are just one super rich guy from no longer having to live and work in the streets. This is the height of romantic fantasy for some? 

For a more lighthearted romantic fantasy with grounding in something much more wholesome than the sex trade, see The Prince and Me with Julia Stiles. It’s a classic romantic fantasy about the commoner who marries a prince. While it lacks Julia Roberts’ blazing charisma, it too has its charms.

Julia Stiles stars in The Prince and Me as Paige Morgan, a Wisconsin University senior with plans for post-graduate education at Johns Hopkins medical school. She refuses to be distracted by anything, especially a boyfriend. This is, of course, when she meets Eddie (Luke Mably), a handsome foreigner who immediately gets on her nerves. Of course they are forced together as lab partners in an important class and Eddie gets a job on campus at the same bar where Paige works.

This is your typical forced romantic setup except that Eddie also happens to be Prince Edward of Denmark. He does not tell Paige about his royal heritage, even after she is kind enough to bring him to her home for Thanksgiving dinner. Paige lives on a dairy farm, which not surprisingly this gives Eddie a number of opportunities to do the kind of fish out of water comedy bits that are the bread and butter of hack screenwriting.

I will give them credit for one inspired bit of Wisconsin humor, watching Eddie compete in a lawn mower race and then brawl with locals makes for a couple of unexpectedly funny scenes. I do have a few questions about this sequence however. It’s Thanksgiving in Wisconsin and it’s sunny and 60 degrees? I seriously doubt that.

Eventually Paige will find out Eddie is actually Prince Edward and various other romantic complications will all lead up to the grand romantic gesture and lets not kid ourselves, it’s no spoiler to say this will have a happy ending. Still, how it gets there is a sweet, often charming story. Stiles and Mably have good chemistry and make a lovely couple. My only quibble is that they’re not very funny. While I liked the actors, both are rather wooden and neither is a great comedic presence.

Director Martha Coolidge is more than capable behind the camera and at times you can see some flares of style. There is an ephemeral look to some of the romantic scenes and like many romantic fantasies she uses a little of that “Barbara Walters lighting” that gives everything a soft edge. Nothing new, but very comfortable and relaxing. There isn’t much for a director to do with a script that is pretty much on auto pilot on it’s way to happily ever after.

The film’s biggest problem is it’s ending. We get what we expect from romantic fantasies but the film tries to get clever about it and ends ups making the characters look very stupid. A simple romantic complication that could have been summed up in two or three lines of dialogue is instead dragged out over another five minutes screen-time. At 110 minutes, the film is way too long and the extended ending makes it feel even longer.

Nevertheless, as romantic fantasies go, I would prefer my daughter (if I had one) to have this fantasy over Pretty Woman any day. It’s charming and sweet with a pair of actors that are destined for greater things. 

Movie Review: The Private Lives of Pippa Lee

The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (2009)

Directed by Rebecca Miller 

Written by Rebecca Miller

Starring Robin Wright, Mike Binder, Alan Arkin, Winona Ryder, Zoe Kazan, Keanu Reeves, Blake Lively

Release Date: November 27th, 2009

Published November 26th, 2009 

One woman re-traces the story of her life as she worries her mind is slipping away in “The Private Lives of Pippa Lee.” Robin Wright stars as Pippa Lee, a wife and mother whose life is defined by those roles. As a very young lost soul, Pippa met and fell in love with the much older Herb Lee (Alan Arkin).When we meet Pippa Lee, she and Herb have moved into a retirement community in Connecticut. While Herb says they moved in order to protect assets from his life as a publishing magnate from taxes, both are concerned that Herb's mind has begun to slip. 

In the middle of the night someone has been wandering the house leaving a major mess. It turns out not to be Herb but Pippa who has been sleepwalking and that isn't all. She is sleep-driving and sleep-smoking, driving in the night to a local 24-hour shop to buy cigarettes. Afraid she is losing her mind, Pippa tracks back in her mind to her mother, Suky (Maria Bello), a woman addicted to amphetamines who didn't merely dote on her daughter but overwhelmed her as a living doll plaything.

Pippa's mother's addiction and massive mood swings lead to Pippa's own drug experimentation and eventually to her running off to New York to live with her lesbian aunt and her girlfriend, Kat (Julian Moore). Blake Lively plays teenage Pippa with a constantly dazed expression and sad eyes. It is teenage Pippa who meets and falls for Herb. 

Though I recount the plot to you in a somewhat linear fashion, writer-director Rebecca Miller, tells the story in a flashback style, cutting between Pippa's life in the retirement community and her life before and during the early parts of her marriage to Herb. The storytelling doesn't really jibe; the past doesn't comment on the present or really explain it. Pippa's memories are sort of random. That's not necessarily a criticism, Pippa is searching her memory for a meaning that is missing from her life and it makes sense that her search is futile.

The story deepens when Pippa meets Chris, the son of one of the other retirees. He has just ended a long relationship and now lives with his mother while working at the 24-hour shop where Pippa sleepwalks. To say what happens between Pippa and Chris would go too far, but I can tell you, it's not entirely what you might expect. That is the wonderful thing about Rebecca Miller's direction in “The Private Lives of Pippa Lee,” she and star Robin Wright Penn avoid typical choices. Penn's performance begins as off-puttingly thin. It grows to an irksome sort of oddity and then blossoms into something strangely, hypnotically fascinating.

If I had walked out half way through “The Private Lives of Pippa Lee” I would say Robin Wright was terrifically awful. However, I stuck with it and eventually I found that even the irritating qualities had an odd fascination. As I got used to Pippa's irritating qualities they began to reveal things about her and I was slowly won over. By the time Pippa makes her dramatic final decision I was totally with her and shocked by how much I was willing to join up for more of her journey.

The movie ends as if it could have gone on for another half hour and been just as intriguing. It's just the right hopeful note and if you can make it to the end, as I did you  will be surprised how satisfying yet abrupt the ending is.

“The Private Lives of Pippa Lee” is a strange and wonderful little movie with a performance by Robin Wright at its center that will divide people in hatred and glowing praise. It's a risky performance and one that will, in the long run, come to define the odd career of Ms. Wright who never quite blossomed into the leading lady so many expected her to be. Instead she is a working actress who’s made daring choices. Daring is the least of what can be said of Robin Wright's performance in “The Private Lives of Pippa Lee.”

Movie Review: The Prodigy

The Prodigy (2019) 

Directed by Nicholas McCarthy

Written by Jeff Buhler

Starring Taylor Schilling, Jackson Robert Scott, Peter Mooney, Colm Feore 

The Prodigy is the latest in a long line of uninspired horror movies with an okay premise that falters in overly familiar execution. It is not merely that The Prodigy is predictable this horror movie from cult horror director Nicholas McCarthy (At the Devil’s Door) is insultingly predictable. The Prodigy is directed as if the film was made specifically for audiences so bereft of common sense that they need every last detail spelled out for them. 

The Prodigy stars Taylor Schilling of the Netflix hit Orange is the New Black as Sarah. As we meet her, Sarah is pregnant and on her way to giving birth to her first child. Crosscut with Sarah’s trip to the birthing center is the escape of Margaret (Brittany Allen) from the lair of a serial killer named Edward Scarka. Edward is known for cutting off women’s hands before murdering them and hiding their bodies. 

Scarka isn’t aware that his latest victim has escaped until he happens to see police approaching his door. At that moment, Edward’s strips nude walks out of his cabin in the woods to confront the cops and essentially commits suicide by cop. This happens just as Sarah welcomes her son Miles into the world and by some crazy movie magic, the soul of the serial killer leaps into the body of baby Miles without anyone noticing. 

At an early age, Miles (Jackson Robert Scott) demonstrates traits well beyond his years, but it is not until he turns 8 years old that his parents notice that he is not the loving young boy he once was. The serial killer has begun to come forward in Miles subconscious leading to him trying to kill his babysitter and eventually turning his evil eye to his extended family. Colm Feore then pops up as a doctor whose existence is predicated on delivering exposition for those in the audience who may nod off for part of The Prodigy and need a character to spell out and reiterate the plot. 

The imagery in The Prodigy is as insultingly simple minded as the script. Early on director McCarthy uses the image of Edward’s face split by makeup or mirrors to underline his dual nature. In case you need cliffs notes in the middle of the movie, Miles has one blue eye and one brown eye as further film school underlining of the kid’s dueling personalities, killer and kid. Perhaps this won’t be perceptible to those that don’t see many movies but if you see movies regularly it may be hard to stifle your groaning and simultaneous eye roll. 

I am struggling to find positive things to say here. I know people complain when I am just negative but there really isn’t much good to say about The Prodigy. It’s clean looking, it has solid if unspectacular cinematography. That’s something. When director McCarthy isn’t overdoing images of duality, he does cut a professional looking scene throughout The Prodigy. I have no qualms about praising The Prodigy for its crisp visuals. That however, is, sadly, not remotely enough for me to recommend the movie. 

Taylor Schilling is perhaps the other element of The Prodigy that is passable. Schilling is good at looking haunted and terrified. I guess it is fair to say that she doesn’t let the script insult her character’s intelligence. Sure, she makes mistakes but nothing a good rewrite of a couple of scenes could not have fixed. Had the film perhaps relied more on her abilities and less on telling instead of showing, she might have elevated the material. 

The Prodigy is not the kind of abomination that makes me hate going to the movies. Is that me saying something nice? The Prodigy is more harmlessly forgettable than it is offensive. Again, I can’t tell if I am being condescending or kind here.