Starring Edward Burns, Jennifer Ehle. Written by David Kane, from
the novel by Alice Hoffman. Directed by Nick Willing. (PG) 99 min.
Opens Oct 21.
If movies have taught us anything about ghosts, it's this: they're
hopeless when it comes to wrapping up their earthly business. In Nick
Willing's The River King, a recently deceased private-school
student attempts to alert the authorities to the nefarious
circumstances of his demise, but limits his supernatural tactics to
appearing in a few photographs. The resultant blotches are dismissed as
mere smudges by investigators who obviously never saw The Omen as children.
Only
one cop suspects foul play -- his name is Abel and he's played by
former movie star Edward Burns, last spotted maintaining a respectful
distance from the special effects in A Sound of Thunder. In the
course of his inquiries, Abel forms a bond with the dead student's best
friend, Carlin (Rachel Lefevre), who seems to know more than she's
letting on. Actually, everyone in the film appears to be
hiding something. It's just that what's being suppressed isn't particularly interesting or even cogent.
The
problem may be that in adapting a complicated novel by Alice Hoffman,
screenwriter David Kane has simply chosen to stress the wrong elements.
The murder mystery fights for screen time with Abel's perfunctory
romance with a comely teacher (Jennifer Ehle) and conflict with his
on-the-take partners at the police station. Then there are the
hallucinations he keeps having of a skittish, wan child (a staple of
any thriller produced after
The Ring), the explanation of which
is so tangentially related to the rest of the story that it's a genuine
howler. Some bad movies are fun to pick apart, but
The River King, which is grey, gloomy and maladroit, can't even stimulate that kind of backwards pleasure.