Leonardo does his best to make this truly suspenseful and you can't help but admire him for it.
From the moment the curtain rolls back Scorsese sets the scene for the next two and half hours, it is dense, tense, dark and supposedly a bit scary.
But people seem polarised on this film. Hate it or not to be missed, some seem undecided, is it crap or really really good?
SPOILER ALERT: When we get to the bottom of though, it seemed a pretty run of the mill psycho suspense thriller about a man battling with the terrible sadness of losing his wife and children - but we are forced to take through this journey through the pretense of man who doesn’t live in reality.
Scorses tries to be all ’The Others‘ or ‘The Sixth Sense‘ clever on us by choosing this route but it’s painfully obvious from early on that something is amiss and it never delivers that jaw dropping ‘I never saw that coming’ satisfaction that both of those two films did.
It takes an awful long time to get there too, but right from the get-go you know something isn’t right, if the trailers and unceasing promos haven’t told you that much you must be living under a rock.
Scorsese always packs a punch and this film has some great moments, the frights and jumps and pretty good and the dark soundtrack is superb building lots of tension, and Leonardo is absolutely smoking as the hot dark and brooding detective trying to solve the mystery of the missing woman. But for all the great acting in the film the thing as a whole doesn’t come together to equal anything brilliant which is what I was expecting.
Perhaps it was the band aid on his forehead that seemed to transcend time that tipped me off, or perhaps it was his distant sidekick Chuck that gave it away I am not quite sure but I knew pretty early on that he was either already dead, or had been in the asylum for some time and wasn’t really who he said he was.
Anyway, sigh. It just didn’t move in any great way and the disjointed fragments of his past, come present, come future, dreams and haunting visions of nazi camps didn’t pull altogether as one and make for a truly ‘wow’ moment. It just didn’t happen.
Some clever twists almost kept me from yawning but it was long, and I started fidgeting and taking notes on my iPhone pissing other people off before it was all revealed a little obviously and then all too quickly he recovers and relapses only to be shipped off for a frontal lobotomy old school style. Thats right people, wham, smack that 12″ nail straight between the eyes, that’ll make him more manageable.