Donnie Darko (2001)

Director: Richard Kelly
Stars: Jake Gyllenhall


Review:

Donnie Darko is an american small town teenager, with mental problems. He have imaginery friends, got into arguments with his sister, rebellious towards teachers, well basically a normal teenager, except he follows order from a creepy imaginery bunny to flood the school and burn down the house of a preacher.

In terms of direction and atomsphere, this is not a bad film, but it is not impressive to me. A major problem with the film is that we agree with Donnie in his viewpoint. Stupid, old-minded teacher preaching about moral lessons, hey, who doesnt want to tell her to shove that up her own ass? Dumbass preacher giving a talk which you forced to attend, hey, who doesnt want to told strictly in his face that what he just said is bullshit and he just doing for his money? And flooding the school to get a day off, well let's face it who doesnt want to do that? So for the most part Donnie is just a pretty ordinary guy, and there is no evidence for anything unusal.

So as the film progress Donnie obsessed with time travel, since the imaginery friend claimed to be from the future, and told him the world was gonna end. He had some  premonitions, scared his psychriatist and wanted to go back in time. Well, I just dunno what should I care about. And the ending, I just pissed when I see that kind of ending. It may seem deep in the first or second time, but it appears so many times that it is annoying and provoking. It simply tells you what you have just witnessed is just shit, and you wasted 2 hours watching something that never happened, not even in the story. It provides shock when The Usual Suspect (1997) did it, when Jacob's Ladder (1990) did it, but now it is provocative and became a big fuck-you in the face to me.

Of course one could bring up the argument of time travel or parallel universe, so that the events did happen in some space-time continuum. But to accept this explanation, you have to buy time travel, a worm hole that appears as a tsunami (a worm hole could easily suck the whole earth in by the way), a human can get sucked in and come up intact, and a ghost that can also time travel with his bunny suit. An alternative explanation would be he is just a nutcase, which you do not have to assume anything. By the principle of Occam's Razor, I would say he is just a nutcase. After all I am a scientist in the general sense of the word.

Maybe my expectation of this film is too high that I have seen or heard nothing but good things about this film, and it turns out to be good in creating suspense and atmosphere, but not much of a masterpiece. And another thing I want to mention, I know it is tasteless to judge an actress with her face, but Maggie Gyllenhaal is too ugly to be a star. Jake is quite handsome but she is just ugly I am sorry.

As long as psychological thriller goes, Donnie Darko would be an good additional to the collection, but I know some better.