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Derek Malcolm's rating
Shutter Island puts Martin Scorsese in limbo
By
Derek Malcolm
15 Feb 2010
There are times when the need to say something relevant and entertain at the same time leads Hollywood into desperate trouble, as in Philadelphia. Not that Martin Scorsese is exactly a Hollywood director. But his effort to adapt Dennis Lehane’s Shutter Island has the same general effect.
It is unlikely to please either Scorsese purists who remember films such as Raging Bull and Goodfellas or those who simply want some ghoulish fun at the cinema. It is overlong, garishly melodramatic and frequently risible in its effects to make us shiver as Leonardo DiCaprio’s US marshall, accompanied by Mark Ruffalo’s sidekick, arrives at Shutter Island, where the criminally insane are incarcerated, to find an escapee.
Instead they discover experiments being made that parallel those of the Nazi doctors during the war. Things, however, are not at all what they seem as psychiatrist Ben Kingsley and headman Max von Sydow try to prevent the interlopers discovering what they are doing.
Scorsese orchestrates all this as if it were a horror story matched with a Victorian melodrama and while it works in spasms, it frequently fails to deliver on the level of realistic drama.
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Reader views (1)
Saw this last night - it really is atrocious. Very disappointing. Scorsese must surely be embarassed by this rubbish.
- Jethro Penzance, Bodmin, 01/04/2010 10:34
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