Shutter Island

"Hey, Boss, did you ever see King Kong?"

Slothrop compared this movie to a Cinnabon. Then he claimed that, because its engineers designed it to give you heart disease and diabetes, the snack is not altogether unhealthy. Then he gave it a B+.

Now, I don't care whether Scorsese intended Shutter Island to be a hulking, gloomy piece of shit. If I did care, I'd probably hate it even more, so be thankful that I don't. I mean, when some drunken lout deliberately, and not accidentally, kicks you in the groin, do you feel more or less sympathetic? I'm sure the honored director had his reasons for taking this overwritten story and turning it into King Kong. Seriously. Kong. I defy you to cite one Kongless example. And I'm also sure that many of those reasons were inspired by theoretical and not formal ambitions, which, probably, is why the movie sucks. If a director wants to make an awful movie, the bad parts had better improve, not worsen, the object and its performance. In Shutter Island, however, all that blustering wind, and all those tormented hallucinations, and all the pretty rats drive the film's canny expressionism, and its pathetic fallacies, and its bland ironies, beyond the confidence of satire and into the cowardice of self-satire. No serious mind can summon enough disbelief to chase this allegory to its fullness.

If the movie were surprising in any way, or the characters worth asking about or feeling for, or the story not both totally ludicrous and drearily predictable, perhaps I would be more generous. But it isn't, and they aren't, and it is. For the audience not to lose interest, and quickly, Shutter Island needs, desperately, to milk its mysterious teet; it cannot afford to be outguessed. I'm a decently dense viewer, and even I had cracked its code after only fifteen minutes. That's pitiful mystery. If you can see it all coming--all those creaking, stupid, obvious twists--even as Leonardo DiCaprio pukes on the high seas to Ape Island, the remaining two hours, I can promise you, feel like four. And what's worse, with the thrill dissipated, all that's left for the audience to do is notice every single bad decision Scorsese makes.

I wanted to like Shutter Island. I wanted, at least, to respect it. C-