Just saw this movie. I’ll tell you this right off the bat: Don’t see it.
Here was my plot summary immediately after it ended… “Stuff happens, stuff happens, we’re suppose to feel sad, stuff happens, we’re supposed to feel happy… more stuff happens, stuff happens, stuff happens, we’re creeped out now… stuff happens, stuff happens, the girl and her brother try to run away, stuff happens, bad woman dies, stuff happens, expensive car explodes, bad guy dies, stuff happens, obligatory melancholy funeral scene, the end.”
While the acting in the movie was pretty good - Leelee Sobieski is a decent actress, and nice eye-candy, t’boot, and Stellan Skarsgard has an amazing voice - the plot is very contrived, the pace of the movie is very jittery, and the dialogue is very well thought-out. At just about every point in the movie, I could see exactly how it must’ve appeared on paper, in the script. Some things just didn’t make sense… the first time the girl begins to feel creeped out, I found myself thinking, “Why, exactly, is she suspecting anything?” At that point, there wasn’t really any reason for her to feel suspicious of her guardians, in my opinion. She just begins “investigating” their behavior because someone, somewhere, thought, “Hey, it would be cool if she did this now.”
I have a habit of spending several hours of contemplation after seeing a movie, absorbing it into my mind so I don’t lose any aspect of it. But with this movie, after watching it, I mentally reviewed it and found that it was all already in my head, because I can just “cut and paste” many of the scenes from previous movies. Heck, the attitude of the girl (“Ruby”) was almost identical to that of Lydia from Beetlejuice. Her little brother was just a replica of Tim from Jurassic Park (although that may have something to do with the fact that Trevor Morgan was just in JPIII).
But what really annoyed me was that they kept trying to play this movie up as “another Hamlet”. They referred to the infamous Shakespeare play several times in the movie. The plot - bad man kills good man, arranges to adopt good man’s children so as to get the $4,000,000 inheritance (the girl’s “kingdom”, as it were) - is also reminiscent of that. However, it just tried so hard to be Hamlet-esque that it flopped. It flopped so hard that it spun around three times before hitting its ass on the floor. Hell, they practically say in the movie that “this is HAMLET, dammit!” (There’s a scene where Ruby is writing a book report on Hamlet, and her opening sentence is “Hamlet is a play about revenge”, basically).
Finally, the biggest flaw is how so many elements seemed to have been thrown into the movie just for the hell of it. When Ruby goes swimming in the middle of the night, for no reason. The obligatory kind old man who gets killed in an obligatory way, for no reason. The inclusion of Mafia-type hitmen who want their money back, apparently for no reason (they guy was already rich… why did he need a loan to get more rich?). The obligatory destruction of an expensive car (a testarossa) for no reason.
But I guess I should have known what I was in for… as soon as I heard Ruby and her friends refer to their parents as “The Rents”, I knew that I was in for a groaner. In fact, the only bright spots of the movie are, A: Miss Sobieski is very attractive, and B: an expensive car blows up. Everything else, you can just sleep through. Hell, you may find it hard to not sleep through.
