Dragonfly Review
by Jon Popick (jpopick AT sick-boy DOT com)February 25th, 2002
Planet Sick-Boy: http://www.sick-boy.com
"We Put the SIN in Cinema"
© Copyright 2001 Planet Sick-Boy. All Rights Reserved.
If you're looking for a thrill, affix your tongue to the business end of a nine-volt battery instead of wasting your money on Dragonfly, Kevin Costner's dopey attempt at a supernatural blockbuster like The Sixth Sense. The only tingling going on wasn't anywhere near my spine but was actually being emitted by my own Sixth Sense, which was telling me to get up and run out of the theatre.
Costner (3000 Miles to Graceland) plays Joe Darrow, an emergency room doctor in Chicago with a fraction of the bedside manner of County General's Dr. Mark Greene. A lot of Joe's gruffness is the misguided manifestation of grief over his recently deceased (and pregnant) wife Emily (Susanna Thompson, Once and Again), who bought the farm via a bus accident in some muddy Third World shithole while working for the Red Cross. Never one to believe in the afterlife (a true man of science), Joe begins to think Emily's spirit is trying to contact him, yet he's still hesitant to believe that the many crazy things happening around him are paranormal in nature rather than his mind playing tricks because he never saw Emily's dead body (it was never recovered, so he's missing that closure thing).
At first, the messages involve dragonflies, which, we're told, were Emily's personal totem (since when do people have totems?). Then Joe meets some of Emily's old school-aged cancer patients (she was an oncologist, in addition to a saint), which gives him a few opportunities to question the kids about seeing his dead wife on The Other Side as they lie in bed, pretending they're Haley Joel Osment and he's some other middle-aged actor with a hairline like David Spade. Things really get crazy when we're introduced to Joe's balding parrot, which used to announce Emily's arrival home but now won't talk at all. Hmmm...I wonder what will happen next?
Since all of the allegedly "creepy" events occur at night when there are no witnesses around, Joe becomes increasingly conflicted over his mental state (I'm told early versions of the script involved suicide attempts). Costner's lack of ability to portray grief will translate into grief of your very own, but, in his defense, he never once writes a letter to Emily, shoves it into a bottle and tosses it into the ocean. His Joe gets a couple of Oscar winners to guide him in his quest for the truth - a lawyer (played by Kathy Bates) and a nun (played by child-sized man-chimp Linda Hunt) who represent both sides of the afterlife debate.
Dragonfly is predictable squared and crammed full of laughably bad dialogue, with every "frightening" moment coming directly from the dog-eared Textbook of Film Horror. My high school teachers went out of their way to remind me how dumb I was, yet somehow I was able to constantly stay two or three steps ahead of this guy with a medical degree. After ravaging the bones of Sense and Ghost, Dragonfly becomes a dumb, fourth-rate version of A.I. and What Lies Beneath before launching into its ballyhooed ending that isn't much of a surprise, assuming you weren't buying popcorn during the first five minutes.
Director Tom Shadyac's last film, Patch Adams, made me wish I was watching golf, but Dragonfly actually made me hanker for a nice, long NASCAR race. The script was penned by debut scribes Mike Thompson and Brendan Camp, with a "polish" job from My Giant's David Seltzer. If you can still catch it, you'd be much better off with The Mothman Prophecies, which features a similarly irrelevant former star but is much more frightening.
1:45 - PG-13 for thematic material and mild sensuality
Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.
