1408 (**1/2)
review by Jon
Waterman
Mike Enslin has made a living writing about the paranormal.
He travels from haunted town to haunted town, studying the
spooky spots and writing reviews in his travel guides. His
quest has left him completely jaded, as he has yet to experience
any sort of apparition or unexplainable spectral event. One
day, he receives a mysterious postcard for a hotel, with only
the room number written on it. Mike figures it’s worth
a shot and so he heads to the Dolphin Hotel to stay the night
in room 1408. When he gets there he finds that getting into
the room with the most horrific, death-laden, and storied past
takes quite a bit of convincing. It seems the powers that be
don’t want the additional press and attention the stay
would bring. But it’s just a little room. It can’t
possibly be evil, can it?
Well, sure it can. Does that make it scary? Not really. As
an audience, it turns out to be more of a curiosity factor
than a fright fest. But I wouldn’t classify it as a psychological
effect either. Sure, if we were in the room, we’d be
feeling its power, but sitting in the theater, it never really
hits home. Here’s the problem. We’re watching one
man who is getting tortured by a sadistic force in the form
of this hotel suite. The hotel is messing with his brain, showing
him all kinds of things that aren’t there and toying
with him on so many different levels. That’s all well
and good, but is it scary? No. The reason being is that we’re
all safe and warm watching someone else’s experience,
with references and conditions tailor-made to his life. Not
only that, but he specifically asked to be put in this situation.
So, nothing in the movie indicates that we should ever fear
for ourselves or that we should worry about something like
that happening to us.
What that all means is the movie can really be nothing more
than a fascinating one-man thriller. Imagine an action movie
where the hero has to battle a room, except good. Still, it’s
fun watching two quality actors, John Cusack (Enslin) and Samuel
L. Jackson (the hotel manager Gerald Olin), play off of each
other. It’s also a lot of fun watching Cusack play off
of the environment. I don’t know if he’s the best
choice for the role, but he does a serviceable job as he gets
into the meat of the paranoia, fear and desperation. There
are some pretty interesting situations presented, at times
very trippy, that you certainly will not expect.
There really aren’t any flaws until the ending. The
movie had me interested until the end, when it all just completely
fell apart. With such and unpredictable series of events throughout
the majority of the picture, you’d think the final act
would be more consistent. It just seemed totally out of place
and extremely unsatisfying. Nothing made sense, and not in
the good way where it’s cryptic and open-ended. Maybe
the ending was the theater’s way of torturing me....
I smell sequel.
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