Movie Box Review

IDENTITY is so clearly a Jerry-Bruckheimer-for-CBS procedural that it comes as a shock to realize that it was neither produced by Bruckheimer nor developed for CBS.  In fact, Mark Gordon's company produced the show for ABC Studios and the ABC network, which must have remembered at some point that it was in fact ABC and passed on the project.  Even as ersatz Bruckheimer/CBS fodder, the pilot wasn't very good.



John Glenn's script (he wrote the silly but successful Shia LaBoeuf vehicle Eagle Eye), centers on an elite FBI squad--it's always an elite squad--organized to stop identity theft and related crime.  The members cover pretty much all the crucial cliches:  steely leader (Angela Bassett), by-the-rules guy who's skilled but a bit of a fuddy-duddy (Orlando Jones), single woman computer genius (Bree Turner), liaison to the "young people" (Jay Paulson)... and, of course, the reckless, intuitively brilliant agent (Colin O'Donoghue) who drives By-The-Rules Guy crazy and who has something to hide.

The pilot cheats--as, no doubt, the series would regularly have done as well--by choosing as the villain an identity thief who's completely insane, a multiple murderer with a very personal motive for his crimes, which probably isn't the norm for this particular kind of illegality.  This allows for a certain amount of story breadth, although hardly any of it is convincing.  Director Gary Fleder provides the required high-tech war room set  with many computer and video monitors, and quick flashback cuts to the various crimes, but none of it can make the pilot seem less generic than it is.

The cast does its job.  Bassett is an actress of enormous strength who nevertheless needs something to play (she was quite good as the senior doctor toward the end of ER's epic run), here she's just used for her air of authority.  At least she was used for something, which put her one up on the other actors--Turner's part is limited to the kind of singleton quips that make you wince for the actress.  Only O'Donoghue is given any kind of storyline, and that one is fairly dumb.

IDENTITY's biggest problem was that it didn't have one--the pilot feels like the script itself should have carried the subtitle "A Busted Pilot."  The chance for identity crimesolvers to have their own primetime network TV series will have to remain on hold for another season.

FilmDistrict has gone out of its way to identify co-writer/co-producer Guillermo del Toro with DON'T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK, to the extent that from the marketing, one could easily fail to realize that the movie is actually directed by first-timer Troy Nixey.   Fair enough:  del Toro has made it clear that although he's not in the director's chair, this is a passion project for him, a remake of the 1973 ABC TV movie that terrified him when he was young.  However, if del Toro wants the association, he also has to take the blame for a dull and not particularly scary horror B-movie.

There are a couple of critical differences between the movie del Toro's made and the one that frightened him.  For one thing, the ABC thriller was a brisk 73 minutes long, to fit a 90 minute timeslot with commercials.  For another, the protagonist of the TV movie was the adult Kim Darby, playing the wife of a couple that moves into a spooky old house, where Darby starts hearing the voices of... something... that lives in the walls.  In del Toro's version, the heroine is the young girl Sally (Bailee Madison, who was one of Jennifer Aniston's kids in Just Go With It).  Sally is the daughter of architect Alex (Guy Pearce), who is divorced from Sally's mother.  Mom (an unseen presence in the movie) has the child on Adderall and has decided that she can't raise the girl any more, so she's unceremoniously delivered Sally to live with Alex and his interior designer girlfriend Kim (Katie Holmes).  They're restoring an old mansion where something terrible once happened, and soon enough Sally is hearing the voices in the walls, who claim to be her friends.

The movie's focus on young Sally makes Don't Be Afraid feel like a low-grade rip-off of del Toro's own great Pan's Labyrinth (there's a scene of Sally wandering in the maze-like back garden that's like a Pan's outtake).  But where Pan was a brilliant mixture of fantasy, political allegory and terror, Don't Be Afraid has nothing on its mind but haunted-house cliches and cheap scares.  Which is another problem, because Don't Be Afraid has exactly one shock that works, and you've already seen it.  It's in all the trailers, and even the TV spots:  Sally peers deeper and deeper into the covers on her bed, the folds of the blankets moving aside ever so slowly and gradually, until BOO!--a creature jumps into close-up while the soundtrack shrieks.  (There's also one notably gross scene at the very beginning that likely singlehandedly won the picture its R rating.)  That bedcovers bit comes about halfway through the movie, and after that things get even less scary:  once del Toro makes the mistake of actually showing the creatures, (spoiler alert) they look like nothing so much as the pixies unleashed by Kenneth Branagh in the second Harry Potter movie. 

Don't Be Afraid has some of the bells and whistles of old-time haunted mansion movies:  the handyman (Jack Thompson) who knows more than he's saying, the important dinner party that you know won't go well, the crucial materials about the past that have to be tracked down in the local (and oddly luxurious) public library.  Much of this is unintentionally funny, and nothing more so than the mythology of the creatures, when we learn what that is (it's got something to do with a black market for teeth, approved by a Pope).  The letdown extends even to the very end, when the voices of the creatures reveal something that's meant to be far more chilling than it actually is.  

Del Toro is the one who contorted this picture so that it would be reminiscent of Pan's Labyrinth, and it was a bad idea in terms of craftsmanship as well as substance and tone, since the new picture is inferior in every way:  whoever was responsible for the movie's look, whether del Toro or Nixey or a combination, has come up with a production design that looks soundstage-bound and photography that's dank without being creepily enveloping.  The acting is no better.  Pearce seems completely unengaged, and Madison spends the whole movie looking glum and/or fearful.  Holmes is a more engaging presence, and her character had the most possibilities, but there just isn't enough meat in the script for her to have any impact.  

Even leaving behind Pan's Labyrinth or the original TV version of the story, the remade Don't Be Afraid of the Dark doesn't have any of the wit or originality of Insidious, the haunted house movie FilmDistrict released earlier this year to remarkable success.   Guillermo del Toro would have been better off preserving his memories by popping the old movie into his DVD whenever he felt the urge to relive his movie-watching youth.

Taiwan star Joe Chen Qiao-En earlier worked on a rain scene for the film TEAR OF FALLEN CITY (KING SING JI LUI).  After working for 18 hours straight she was completed soaked and often shivered from the chill.  In the scene she needed to have a face full of tears.  After completing several scenes her eyes were already all red and swollen.  With the action scene in which she was robbed, she injured her elbow.  To keep from hindering the production progress, Chen Qiao-En insisted against any rest and was very professional.