Reviews

***POSSIBLE SPOILERS***

This movie borrowed a lot from movies like Shawshank Redemption. At times I even expected to hear Morgan Freeman begin to narrate "Andy was a quiet man...". Still, at its core, this movie was decent and worth watching.

Unfortunately, most of the story gets buried under heaps of irritating American patriotic dramatization. Saluting, drumming dog tags, praising the flag, singing war songs; after a while it gets very annoying. Just about everything Robert Redford's character says winds up with him giving some long winded speech about what it is to be a soldier. And are American soldiers truly that obsessed about their flag?

Anyways, the plan that the prisoners hatch is fun to watch unfold even if some of the elements seem a bit far fetched. It truly was the high point of the movie and was worth sitting though all the military politics to get there. To be honest, this movie seems as though it started out as a cool prison breakout-style movie but heaps of "go USA" sentimentality tacked to cash in on the latest "war" the US is currently fighting. I'm sure a lot of "non-Americans" like myself were groaning at all the cliches.

To conclude, the movie *was* worth watching, the acting is legitimate, the plot, although not original, was well executed, and despite all efforts of the producers to practically smother us in American patriotism, this movie was not only bearable, it was rather entertaining.

***SPOILERS*** ***SPOILERS*** Right from the start this movie was on a collision course for disaster. The fact that Shannon Elizabeth was staring in it should have been the first clue. The whole movie simply *reeks* of Hollywood-ism, as if it were made up by the same Armani-wearing, Laté-drinking, ghoti-touting hipster who thought up S-Club 7. From the custom tailored raincoats that Cyrus' crew wore at the beginning, to the designer `ghost goggles', the movie is simply dripping with style, when it should have been dripping with blood.

The premise for the movie isn't a bad one (family inherits haunted mechanical mansion), and the idea that people can only see the ghosts with the special glasses *could* have made for some creepy moments. However, I felt absolutely no connection to the family at all. They had no chemistry whatsoever, as if the actors simply rattled off their lines and then went to their separate trailers. At no point in the film did I feel at all empathetic towards them, I didn't care at all if they got out of the house alive. The worst of the bunch was the nanny who was a feeble attempt at adding comic relief to the movie. Instead, she comes across as yet another one-liner barking token black actor. Only Matthew Lillard's character can compete with the nanny in sheer cliché one-liner-spewing volume. Honestly, who is responsible for coming up with the lines for these people? Yet another failed attempt at hip-afying character dialog that is totally inane and out of place in the first place. Just about every remark these characters make is doused in horribly tame sarcasm.

The only saving grace in this high budget, low mileage flop is the ghosts themselves. I didn't find the idea of a well lit glass mansion to be at all scary. However, the variety of monsters was formidable and the makeup and costumes were excellent. The iron cage around the `Jackal's' head, and the vomit covered man-child were particularly nice touches. Unfortunately, the `Marylyn Manson music video' stuttering effect, which is used whenever the camera is focused on the ghosts, becomes old and overused *very* quickly.

The `surprise' appearance by Embeth Davidtz, who plays the lady with the book of spells, certainly *was* a surprise to me.it surprised me to see someone who was a worse actor than Shanon Elizabeth! I was tempted to fast forward through the parts where she hopelessly tries to spin a tale of mystery and lore behind the ghosts. She does so using veritable buckets of mumbo jumbo and tries desperately to look concerned about the family's predicament.but fails miserably. All in all, her performance comes across as something more suited to an episode of VIP than a big screen movie. What's worse is the `twist' that was added, where it turns out she was working for Cyrus' all along. It was so ludicrous and obviously tacked on at the last minute, I couldn't help but laugh.

But, like all movies, this one had to end. Once everyone gets bored watching people run away from invisible ghosts in a glass house the director decides to wrap it up. The ending was particularly useless as the film makers scrambled desperately to tie up the loose ends. In the span of about three minutes Cyrus gets thrown into the spinning machine by the ghosts, the nanny then breaks the machine, the dad `saves' the kids (ie: pointlessly jumps inside the whirling rings simply to comfort the kids), the family gets a brief glimpse of their ghost mom, and the nanny spouts off every one-liner she didn't get to say during the first part of the movie. To top this speedy dispatch the musical director felt it would be most fitting to roll the credits with a *spooooky* rap song! Good call! I mean, how do you expect to sell the Thirteen Ghosts soundtrack if you don't insert a bunch of crappy commercial music in, right?

Conclusion, this movie feels like it was thought up one afternoon by some Los Angles movie-making yuppie on his way to an appointment with his hairdresser. A *lot* more money than talent was funnelled into this project, and it shows. There is no excuse for big budget horror films like these to not be scary at all. Maybe the producers were too busy trying to inserting product placement for the sunglasses into every shot.

Rating: 2/10