You mean the person looking for the killer IS the killer?! How original! - justin_guber

You mean the person looking for the killer IS the killer?! How original!

Yes, the title has just ruined the so-called 'twist' of the movie 'Hide and Seek', but believe me, you're all the better for it.
So yesterday I trekked off to Times Square with my girlfriend to pick up a DVD player. I was sick and tired of having to carry the DVD player from the Taman Tun house (which no-one lives in but I put all my DVD's/comics/guitars/computer stuff there to keep it safe from curious lil' bro) to the Damansara house (where my parents and bro live and I... sleep in). Let the parents keep the Elba, I'll buy some no-brand DVD player.

And what a no-brand piece of shit it is. The tray where you put your disc in is plastic (and I'm not talking plastic made to look like something harder, I mean see-through baby-blue plastic) and when I first switched it on the tray kept opening and closing and opening and closing and opening and closing.

Aha. A haunted DVD player.

But for RM180 you can't really complain. It plays DVD's, and after watching my choice for the night ('Not Another Teen Movie', because I needed a dose of the funnies) we popped in 'Hide and Seek', starring Robert De Niro and Dakota Fanning.

And all I can say is, "damn, that sucked".

Everything was kinda ok for the first 3/4's of the movie, albeit slow. Then they killed a cat, which pulled my emo-strings a bit (don't fuck with the kitties!) and an effective (though basic) scare invoking the rule of 3 involving a closet.

But when it turns out Robert De Niro, the father trying to figure out who's doing all this, is the killer all along, you could hear my girlfriend and I both exclaim in a collective sigh, "ah, fuck."

The twist killed it for me. It really did. When the first 3/4's of your movie is a slow build in tension and suspense your money shot better be on the fucking money. I personally wanted it to be some kind of spirit, or the neighbour (a red herring that never goes any-fucking-where), hell, even the sherriff.

Or Dakota. Why couldn't Dakota have just done it all? That would've really fucked with everyone. That would've been a kick-ass 3rd act freak session, a little kid with a machete ready to hack De Niro and Famke Jannsen (is that right? I don't know how to spell it!) to ribbons.

What's annoying is the 'it was me?!' twist has been done before, and better. And it works best when the clues are not so fucking obvious. Check out Fight Club - once the twist is revealed, it puts an entirely new spin on everything we've just seen, begging for re-watches. We accepted what happened before the twist as the gospel truth, and when we get the twist the whole cinema exclaims collectively, "no-fucking-way-!"

But this (and 'Secret Window' for that matter) does the opposite: we watch the first 3/4's of the movie wondering "why's this like that?" and when the twist comes it answers everything. It doesn't twist up the story, it answers everything we didn't quite get before, making the final quarter of the movie nothing more than a hack n' slash.

And you'd have thought it'd be fun to see Robert De Niro go nuts with a shovel and a blade, right? Wrong. Come on, Bobby!

In fact, it makes you wonder why the entire cast did this movie in the first place. You've got Robert De Niro (a man permanently etched into the collective conscious of movie-goers for Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, Cape Fear, hell, even Meet the Fockers), Elisabeth Shue (a chick who went from being Marty McFly's girlfriend to Nicolas Cage's prostitute pal) and Famke Jansen (who not only squeezed 007's ribs but will forever be glued into all comic-geek minds as Jean Grey/Marvel Girl/Phoenix). Do any of these people really need to do shit to make ends meet?

And Dakota. Dear sweet Dakota. Is she always going to be the girl on-call when it's time to put a little girl through unholy hell? She's put up with aliens (not once, but twice), a retarded yet loving father and Brittany Murphy. And now her mother's slit her wrists and her dad's a schyzophrenic psychopath. In the real world, all the characters she's played would need serious therapy. Or a gun.

For some reason watching (and being dissapointed by) 'Hide and Seek' reminded me how I still haven't gotten round to writing that horror movie I've got written out as an idea sheet at the moment. I wonder...

1.8.05 05:06

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