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NOT QUITE THERE
THE INVISIBLE (PG-13) The Invisible, adapted
from Swedish novel Den Osynlige and the film
of the same name, is a rather curious movie.
Directed by David S. Goyer, the lower-tier comic
movie god who wrote the Blade trilogy and
Batman Begins (why the talented scribe left
the screenwriting duties to writers Mick Davis
and Christine Roum is more mysterious than the
film), The Invisible thrusts the audience into a
strange teenage world quite unlike the reality
known to most. For the
first 30 minutes, I felt as
if I'd mistakenly waltzed
into a foreign film that
was halfway over and lack
ing subtitles as I watched
golden child Nick Powell
(Justin Chatwin, War of the
Worlds) sleepwalk through
his perfect life and bad
girl Annie Newton (former
Russian gymnast Margarita
Levieva) steal hers.
Helping little to clear
my confusion was the
misleading trailer that
implied Nick to be Annie's
boyfriend and provided a
creepy old geezer to explain the gravity of Nick's
situation. In what the film rather loopily sub
stitutes for reality, Annie is actually Nick's killer
(don't worry; that's not a spoiler), and there's
no expositional old guy. Once I'd recovered from
the practical joke of a preview and settled into
Goyer's bizarre, alternate reality (once Nick is at
tacked and the second act kicks in), I could ac
knowledge The Invisible for what it was, a solid,
limited improvement over Goyer's last directorial
effort, Blade Trinity.
Crisp, clear and cold, the picture is hard to
categorize. Is The Invisible a whodunit in which
you know who did it or a fantastical teen drama
hiding behind a thriller's mask? The plot may re
quire the ghost of a dying Nick to solve his own
attempted murder in order to live again, but the
story cuts deeper into the divergent paths down
which the death of a parent may lead.
The loss of Nick's father pushed him to excel
in order to escape the suffocating perfection
of his mother (Marc* Gay
Harden). Annie lost not
only her mother but her
moral compass and her de
sire to live; she constantly
pushes those around her to
the edge, hoping someone
will push back hard enough
to send her over the cliff.
Unfortunately, The Invisible
shrouds its teens' motiva
tions in cool indifference
and dreary ennui. Still, the
flick stands out for some
brilliantly executed same-
shot trickery wherein the
insubstantial Nick affects
the world around him while
not changing it at all. Broken windows replace
themselves before the camera pans back around,
and actors collect themselves from the floor to
which Nick has knocked them without so much as
missing a beat.
If only Goyer the writer, not just Goyer the
imaginative director, had shown up to work on
the picture. The Invisible might have burned off
its self-induced haze.
Drew Wheeler
Justin Chatwin
novel
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