Review: Hide and Seek

Rober Deniro lends heft to any movie that he is in. Dakota Fanning, who many admire for her work in Taken, but who I had never seen before, plays her role well. But she's not given a great deal to do for the first 80% of the movie. She pretty much spends her time not talking to people, staring straight ahead with those big eyes in an onimous, creepy way; and generally just acting as a point of mystery for her dad. She admits as much fo Famken Jannsen when she says that she and her "imaginary" friend Charly are playing a game trying to upset her daddy.

During most of this time Robert DeNiro carries the movie. He gives the movie an emotional center, as we empathize with a dad who is struggling to deal with the loss of his wife and an increasingly distraught and uncommunicative daughter. When the plot twist finally arrives and the action kicks up, Dakota Fanning is finally given more to do and she delivers.

Fine acting by the two leads asside, this is a movie that was a huge disappointment. The movie is punctuated by a series of trips to the family bathroom, where, each time, an unpleasant suprise is found in the tub and a new ominous message is written in crayon (red crayon, of course, to make us think of blood). These bathroom trips contain all of the tension, and the rest of the movie (until the reveal) is spent just following DeNiro and Fanning in their everyday life. Dad gets a new girlfriend who has to try to win his daughters approval; Dad gets a parking ticket; they meet the neighbors... not exactly edge of the seat stuff. But most of these scenes are played for tension, as Dakota Fanning stares ominously and the music builds to a crescendo. All of these turns out to be false leads. This is a movie that is chock full of red herrings.

Worse, you can predict them as red herrings. I'm not one that typically tries to figure out a movie, but this one was so obvious that even I was able to guess what would happen. The first "scare" turns out to be nothing more than the family cat leaping across the camera... despite the fact that we had never seen the cat before. That is, the cat is used exclusively for the cheap scares, and when it's not doing that, it is no where to be seen. There is one shot that contains the cat, purring in front of a fire, that doesn't have it being used in some "scary" way. These cat scares are utterly predictable, though.

Equally predictable were the folks that would get killed. I won't go into it, in case you do see it and are somehow able to shut off your brain, maybe it will be a suprise. But the same is true of the "twist." A good 15 minutes before the reveal I leaned over to Toni and whispered "I wonder if..." and of course that turned out to be the case. This particular plot twist would have been suprising and rewarding 10 years ago, but by now it has become almost a cliche, as numerous other movies have attempted the same gimmick. And it is a gimmick, let me assure you. The wool is pulled over the audience's eyes with gleefull exuberance by the director, and when the truth is revealed it just made me feel cheated. In a movie like the Sixth Sense, the ending is a suprise because the director withholds certain information from the audience, but never does the director lie or fabricate information. In this movie, the director delibrately shows false images to the audience. The story is not strong enough to support the mystery through honest means; rather to make it work, it resorts to presenting scenes that aren't really happening. After the reveal the false scenes can be justified, but it is just a justification rather than an intricate and honest means of plot development.

I had a similar reaction after Ocean's 12, though not quite as strong. (Warning: Oceans 12 spoilers ahead) In that movie the whole audience is led to believe that the main heist is busted, and much of the screen time is spent on this bit of misdirection. We only learn in the reveal, through flashbacks, that the real heist already happened and what the audience had been watching was all staged. But in that movie, at least, what was being shown to the audience actually occurred. In this one, probably a good 15 mins of screen time is devoted to shots of activities that never actually occured.

As you can tell, I'm disappointed in Hide and Seek. I think DeNiro has been coasting for years, and this movie is another sub-par effort. The last great movie he's made, in my mind, was Ronin back in 1998. Since then we've had a string of films in which he has been exploiting the image of all the great work he's done in the past for comedy (in Analyze This, Analyze That, Meet the Parents, Showtime, Shark Tale, and *shudder* The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle). It's time for him to get back in the saddle and start making classic movies again. Having Robert DeNiro in a film still guarantees that there will be great acting... but it no longer guarantees that it will be a great movie.

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