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.

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