MOVIE REVIEW - Shutter Island

Lots of hype about the new Shutter Island, new at the box office this weekend. You've got a big time director in Martin Scorsese and a big star in Leonardo DiCaprio, you would think you have a formula for a big movie. But you don't.

This two hour and twenty minute "thriller", has been promoted in theaters and on TV for months. They have been waiting till the right time to put it in the houses. And they chose February. No competition. That's a good thing.

This is the story of a fictional insane asylum in 1954, eleven miles out in Boston Harbor. It's for the worst of the worst mental cases. There has been a disappearance of one of it's inmates, and the U.S. Marshall's are called in to investigate. Upon their arrival, there is suspicion that things aren't right there. It smacks of cover-ups private agendas. What is really going on there, who are these people and why is the U.S. Government funding such a strange and suspicious place?

I think that Shutter Island is supposed to be scary, and thrilling. But it's not. I think it's supposed to be really smart but it's not. And I think we're supposed to be in awe of this kind of movie making, where a big time director takes on a new kind of project, but we're not. It isn't that Shutter Island is a bad movie, it's just a movie. Average at best. A story that thinks it's smarter than it really is, all the while being overdone and predictable. Oh, and did I mention, slooooow and draaaagyyy at times?

Dicaprio is badly miscast, as he still looks 18, where his character is the better part of 35. Ben Kingsley is always great and is here as well as the asylums head doctor. Also nice small performances by Max von Sydow, Jackie Earle Haley, and the movies show stealer, Patricia Clarkson as a banished doctor in one simple scene is tremendous. These three prop up Shutter Island, but can't save it. Shutter Island has too many flaws.

Shutter Island. Too long, and just flat out too average. Not a lost night, just a long night.