| Review by Jim |
| Plot: After getting prematurely released from a mental institution, the unstable Spider finds himself back in the place where he grew up staying at a halfway house. He also begins to relive his disturbed childhood and find out just what made him crazy in the first place. Review: I really felt like I had accomplished something when I walked out of Hollywood Video with Spider and May tucked underneath my arm. After all, these were supposed to be true horror/psychological films and had both been spoken highly of. Not to mention that Spider had been directed by THE David Cronenberg. While I feel at least somewhat satisfied with May, I really can't say the same with Spider. It's slow to the point of exhaustion (I found myself dozing or wanting to fastforward the movie many a time), Spider's backstory is weak, and we just don't generally care about anyone or anything in the movie until the credits roll and we can take it back to the video store. Spider trys to sell itself as a disturbing psychological journey with many complex twists and turns that are supposed to be invisible to the average moviegoer as well as being like a David Lynch movie. The problem is that Spider is none of those things yet still acts as if it is. First of all, the film suffers from the fact that we just can't get inside Spider's twisted head. The movie was based off a book in which the story was told from his point of view, but that just can't be done in the film. All he comes off as is that drunken bum in your neighborhood that you try to avoid. He wears layer after layer of shirts (and he has that trench coat too), he chain-smokes every minute of the day, he shivers and stumbles around, and on top of all this every single one of his lines is spoken incoherently. In short, I just don't give a damn about Spider, the only thing his character invokes in me is the desire to throw some spare change at him so he'll get out of my face. Admittedly, Ralph Finnes does a decent performance, but this isn't exactly stretching his acting muscles. Just how hard can it be to stumble around mumbling and smoking for 90 minutes? On top of all this, he writes in his own language and makes webs from string in his room. As to why anybody let him out of the crazy house is beyond me (maybe good behavior?). The only other characters consist of Spider's mom and dad from the past and the owner of the halfway house (who has a few minutes worth of a role). Gabriel Byrne plays Spider's father, but I didn't believe for a goddamn minute that he was English. His parents play a key role in his insanity, which should be the strongest plot point, but it turns out to be one of the weakest. His dad likes to get stinko every night at the local pub and starts having an affair with a bar girl until one night they both decide to kill his wife. From then on, she replaces her as the mother figure until Spider decides to kill her with a complex system of strings attached to the gas lines. But this is where the "twist" takes place, but you'll see it coming well before the film is over. Lesson 1: never believe that a crazy person is going to tell a story the way it actually happened. The perfect word I can think of to associate Spider with is cumbersome. It's slow-paced and tedious, there's so many times I felt like fast-forwarding or yawned. All we do is watch Ralph Finnes walk around shitty and run-down areas of England, mumble to himself, and have a flashback or two to his childhood. In the end, Spider isn't complex or psychological. Instead, it's predictable and boring with a character we couldn't care less about let alone understand what he's saying. So I say don't waste any time or money on watching Ralph Finnes babble on and wander around aimlessly, just skip it. |
| Rating: *1/2 |
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