Secret Window Review
by Jon Popick (jpopick AT sick-boy DOT com)March 11th, 2004
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Maybe my expectations of Secret Window were too high. But can you blame me? It stars the world's greatest actor who doesn't look like Charles Bronson (sorry, Sean). It's based on a Stephen King short story, which we all know are generally much less sucky than films made from his full-length novels (The Shawshank Redemption and Stand By Me vs. Dreamcatcher and Thinner). The story is rooted in the very King-friendly land of insanity via isolationism (The Shining), as well as famous writers and both their wacko fans (Misery) and their personal demons (The Dark Half). And Window was adapted by David Koepp, who has recently shown vast improvement as both a director (Stir of Echoes vs. The Trigger Effect) and a screenwriter (Panic Room vs. The Shadow).
Sadly, all of these factors fail to create anything I can recommend to my readers, unless they're really big fans of Johnny Depp (Pirates of the Caribbean). He plays Mort Rainey, a relatively successful writer who, after discovering his wife Amy (Maria Bello, The Cooler) in bed with another man (The Dark Half's Timothy Hutton), has spent the last six months living in a cabin in Upstate New York. It's never really made clear whether Mort is always this lazy, or if his slovenliness has to do with the breakup of his marriage (ditto for his writer's block), but he spends most of his time asleep in a ratty bathrobe.
One of Mort's many daytime siestas is interrupted by a knock at the door, which turns out to be the kind of visitor you never really want to get: A tall, thin, weird-looking guy wearing a big Amish hat and saying all kinds of scary shit (didn't this happen already in Poltergeist II: The Other Side?). The stranger (John Turturro, Anger Management) introduces himself as John Shooter just before lighting into Mort with accusations of plagiarism. Long story short, the nutter gives Mort three days to come up with proof that his story was published before Shooter says he wrote his.
What follows is fairly typical: Dead pets, arson, and the general lack of interest from the lackadaisical small-town sheriff. And Koepp handles it well, too. The first hour of Window is perfectly enjoyable, but other than a couple of neat visuals - including one stunning post-prologue shot that went on until my jaw hurt from dropping - Window represents a step backwards for Koepp's filmmaking. And I say that only because of Window's piss-poor last half-hour, which simply degenerates into every other C-grade thriller.
For a movie that's ultimately about a writer trying to come up with a better ending for his story, Window is in desperate need of a livelier conclusion of its own. I assumed Koepp recognized the obvious irony, and was prepared for a big sucker-punch after what I assumed was the faux-ending, which I could see coming ten miles away. Instead, I got Johnny Depp eating corn. That's it. Granted, it's corn on the cob, which is certainly more exciting than, say, creamed corn. And Johnny Depp is eating it, and I'd have to say that would be better than watching Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson do the same thing.
1:33 - PG-13 for violence/terror, sexual content and language
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