Thanks, I Hate It: Shutter Island

I love Scorsese, but when he sucks, he really sucks. The insufferable mush-mouthed grandiosity of Silence, the phoned-in domestic lives and tough guy talk of The Departed; he's not past his peak by any means (look no further than 2013's Wolf of Wall Street if you want proof), but he has his weaknesses as a director. His feel for casting is hit or miss, his attention span for and insight into the inner lives of women patchy at best. With Shutter Island, though, he found a new low.

From the legless melodrama of DiCaprio's performance as a mental patient convinced he's investigating the deaths of his wife and children to the movie's over-reliance on the music of modern composer Max Richter as a substitute for emotional content, Shutter Island is insultingly blunt and bland. It rests its dramatic weight on a twist not so much inexplicable as without meaning, counting on our shock that the detective is really a patient at the titular facility to enrich its meaning. Unfortunately the twist adds nothing, unfolding to operatic strings and images of apocalyptic loss which echo in the emptiness of the lead character and setting both.

And the setting! God, the setting. A heap of shopworn insane asylum cliches, right down to staring, wide-eyed patients and withered fingers raised to lips in shushing motions. There's nothing here to bring us deeper into the experience of psychosis, or of institutionalization. The building itself has character, and Scorsese is too good a filmmaker to waste its labyrinthine interiors and shabbily antiseptic common areas, but Shutter Island is too soft at heart to function as a thriller, too sexless and sentimental to dig into the director's earlier insanity-based successes like Cape Fear and Taxi Driver. 

Scorsese's decision to play against his own type with a softer, more heartfelt story backfires messily. With no emotional thread beyond a man's dead family, there's precious little to cling to and less to anticipate. A few rote scares do little more than mark time as the whole thing winds on endlessly (139 minutes when it should be no more than 90) toward its unimpressive conclusion. What does any of it mean? It's equal parts Brazil without the mania, Manhunter without the monster, and Vertigo without the paranoia, a lukewarm cobbling together of the least effective dregs of a dozen better movies. You couldn't pay me to sit through it again.