His adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s novel is a disjointed mess that even manages to make Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo and Ben Kingsley look bad. Worse, it’s not even scary. Scenes that are supposed to be terrifying are so over-the-top that they’re laughable.
Scorsese never gets a handle on Lehane’s mystical story about a pair of US marshals investigating the disappearance of a child-killer on a wind-swept island off the coast of Massachusetts.
“Shutter Island” veers off in so many directions — Cold War conspiracies, Nazi concentration camps and human guinea pigs, to name a few — and employs so many flashbacks and hallucinatory dreams that it’s almost impossible to follow. Sharper editing, more realistic performances and subtler special effects wouldn’t have solved all the problems, but at least they might have made it watchable.
Scorsese can’t decide what kind of film he’s making — Hitchcock horror, political thriller or psychological puzzle. So he tries to combine them all, with disastrous results.
Here are a few lowlights:
DiCaprio, speaking with a lame Boston accent left over from Scorsese’s “The Departed,” delivering this bit of cornball while searching for his wife’s killer: “He’s here. I can feel him.”
Ruffalo, playing DiCaprio’s fellow marshal, continually calling his partner “boss” in a feeble tone reminiscent of Lennie from “Of Mice and Men.”
Kingsley, as the hospital’s menacing chief shrink, greeting a storm-soaked DiCaprio at a lighthouse supposedly used for dastardly medical experiments: “Why you all wet, baby?”
Speaking of wet, “Shutter Island” may have you reaching for your raincoat. Much of the movie takes place during a fierce hurricane that keeps messing up DiCaprio’s neatly cropped hair.
Adding to the foreboding atmosphere are flashbacks to the Dachau concentration camp, where then-soldier DiCaprio is traumatized by the site of bodies frozen in the snow. There’s also a dungeon where the most dangerous mental patients are locked up like animals, a mystery woman (Patricia Clarkson) hiding in a cave and a cryptic note left behind by the escapee.
Despite those intriguing elements and an all-star cast that includes Michelle Williams, Max von Sydow and Emily Mortimer, it’s basically a B movie in disguise. You have to go all the way back to “Boxcar Bertha,” a 1972 “Bonnie and Clyde” knockoff, to find a Scorsese film this crude.
Back then, he had an excuse: It was his first studio feature.
