Hide
and Seek boasts a roster of A-list acting talent, perhaps the two finest actors
of their respective generations in DeNiro and Dakota Fanning and, if the trailers
can be trusted, a promising evening of thrills and chills at the Bijou. As we
begin, DeNiro and his daughter Emily are beginning the recovery process after
having lost their wife and/or mother to suicide. Moving away from New York, they
hope to begin anew in a creepy isolated house, on the edge of some even creepier
woods. DeNiro plays a Clinical Psychologist, and for her part, Fanning is perfect
as the badly drawn girl, with the dark, bagged eyes that hide behind them the
secret of the film.
Things
soon take a turn for the weird when Emily mutilates her favorite bed-time doll
and begins to speak of a new "imaginary" friend that goes by the name
of Charlie. As Psychologists tend to do, DeNiro is concerned by this new character
in his daughters life, but dismisses it as a normal part of the recovery process.
As it turns out, as you may well surmise, Charlie is anything but a healthy presence
in the house, an sure enough, bizarre things begin to occur.
Director
John Polson (Swimfan), whose track record certainly doesn’t suggest that
he’d be the best choice to helm a project of this magnitude, gets the look
of the film right, but the pacing is all wrong and the cheap-scares that dot the
first act are of the most banal sort, (cats and tea kettles, power-outages, you
name it) all courtesy of the bag of psych/thriller cliches. The cast (Famke Janssen,
Dylan Baker, Elisabeth Shue, Amy Irving) all acquit themselves as well as you
would expect, but you can practically read along with the dialogue and the story
never really engages the audience in any sort of novel or creative way. We’ve
seen all this before, and seen it done much better.
Of
course, it all boils down to the big revelation as to who or what "Charlie"
turns out to be - but any amateur sleuth worth his gum could see this one coming
down the St. Lawrence Seaway. Once the identity has been let out of the bag, you’re
pretty much praying that the movie ends as fast as possible. Just terribly painful
to watch - the ending. Not in the least bit scary - just sad beyond description.
The creators of Hide and Seek, offer two or three possible "Charlie"
candidates - hoping that may throw enough of a head-fake at the audience so as
to surprise them. I’m going to rate this film according to how successful
they managed to do this.
