FILM: Dreamcatcher Is a Joke, a Very Bad Joke

Can a movie be schizophrenic?

Dreamcatcher, Lawrence Kasten's adaptation of the 2001 Stephen King novel, is like, well, Now and Then meets Powder meets Outbreak - with aliens. And no, that's not a good thing.

After opening with a rather touching story of four childhood friends growing up and facing the world, Dreamcatcher ambushes its audience with a gory alien storyline that makes no effort to convince us of its believability. The movie deteriorates from there, launching into six different incoherent subplots peppered with hideously unrealistic (though expensive) special effects and such dialogue gems as "You killed Beaver." Several times during the movie, I thought to myself, "Is this a joke?"

And it was. It was one of those really long jokes that you tell when you're drunk that's kinda funny, but never really gets to the punchline. It just didn't know it. Aside from the four friends' relentlessly witty banter, the laughter-inducing scenes in Dreamcatcher were entirely unintentional. Morgan Freeman going kamikaze in a high-jacked military helicopter? Donnie Wahlberg morphing from mentally handicapped adult to benevolent alien savior? Jason Lee sitting straight-faced on a toilet seat to contain a creature expelled from somebody's anus?

Somehow, in book form, through his ironic, slightly satirical prose, Stephen King makes these things work. Yet when transferred to film under Kasten's direction, each image becomes shallow, cartoonish and ultimately laughable. I could hear King's voice in character idiosyncrasies and pop-culture references, but watched as it was buried under a story far too cumbersome for the production team trying to hold it together. I longed to read about the film's intriguing characters, knowing how much stronger and more coherent the 600-page medium would have made the convoluted plot.

Perhaps Dreamcatcher never should have been adapted into a movie, or perhaps Kasten isn't a talented enough filmmaker to pull it off. Whatever the explanation, a good book, some relatively impressive acting (Damian Lewis is remarkable as an alien in good-guy body) and an amazing Matrix short (see below) are all squandered mercilessly in this mangled mess of an adaptation.

-Corinne Low