The Invisible (2007)
Review by Tony DeFrancisco
Lately, the one thing that has been on my mind is the word that every one shakes at the thought of – remakes, or horror remakes in general. A few recent ones that come to mind that were pretty good and better than their originals were Dawn of the Dead, The Ring, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (even though I don’t consider it a remake, as much as I do of a sequel). And there are always the bad ones – Psycho, The Hitcher, and The Wicker Man. Thankfully, The Invisible falls under the first category.
The Invisible (remade from a Swedish film that was adapted from a book) is directed by David S. Goyer. Is the name familiar to you? If you say no, don’t be surprised, but if you say yes, I wouldn’t be surprised because you are most likely a Blade fan that says that he killed the series after the third one and the ill-fated TV show (which may be true, but I don’t have a boner over them so I couldn’t tell you). It seems like if you hated him for that, you shouldn’t mind him here. You know, there are times where you can step away from the pack and actually like something everyone hates.
Before I get on with the premise, this may be a great time to bring up the shameless MySpace promotion Goyer and his team of advertisers has been doing. You know me, I hate promoters more than Dan Fogler, but this is just another one of them cases where the promotion didn’t work. The Invisible scored around twenty million domestically in the box office, which doesn’t sound like a whole lot, but it’s more than what is in my pocket right now. The film will find life on DVD, and I will give my heart to it that I help it to succeed.
Nick Powell (Justin Chatwin, in a role that looked more like Devon Sawa with darker and more emo-like hair) is a high school teenager, who is well-respected by his classmates and peers. When he talks, they listen. It’s like Confucius reincarnated himself into a high-schooler’s body. Nick is friends with Pete (Chris Marquette), who owes a certain amount of sum of money to two bullies and Annie (Margarita Levieva), a girl that seems to have many problems of her own. Nick, being sick of always staying with his mom (Marcia Gay Harden), decides to fly to London one night to take an English writing course.
Well, Annie and her boyfriend (Alex O’Loughlin) decide to rob a jewelry store, and all of the jewels that she stole she stored in her locker. Her and her boyfriend got into some predicament, and he decides to rat her out to the cops. At the same time when she placed it in her locker, Pete was a witness to it and when the cops let her go, she thinks it was Pete. So while going to hunt down Pete, he admits that it wasn’t Pete that ratted her out – it was Nick, who was supposedly on the flight to London but really his mom found out about it and thwarted his plans. The night he was supposed to go, he gets drunk and walks down a road, where Annie and two goons follow him and kill him.
But there’s a problem with that. Nick didn’t actually die and fails to cross over to death, so his body is lying somewhere while Nick’s soul walks around. Nick, not knowing that he is separated from his body, walks to school like any other day. In one of his classes, he notices that he is completely invisible to people, where in most cases he would be the one talking and they would be listening. He figures out that he is invisible to everyone, but while the police and his mother search for him, Nick follows Annie around, while she copes with a guilty conscious and realizes that she isn’t much different than him.
The title describes both of the leads, Nick and Annie. While Nick is invisible to others because he is about to pass on, Annie is invisible in a different way. See, after her mother died, Annie has been neglected by everyone but her younger brother, who looks up to her as a role model. She hasn’t been getting any attention, so she becomes troubled just to get attention, but even that doesn’t work. Once she kicks Nick in the face to supposedly kill him, she realizes that she is not invisible anymore, and now a prime suspect to the case and now wishes that she was invisible again.
But before Nick turned invisible, he was clearly one of those teens that wished the attention was focused away from him. In his class, they think of Nick as a hero and a philosopher. His mom is literally up his asshole at all times, and it kills Nick because his mother never lets him go. His writing is insanely dark that almost foreshadows his own death. He dreams about putting a gun to his head and blowing his brains, which is clear that he is suicidal. Thus, the emo-haircut has more of a purpose than the emo-haircut in Spider-Man III.
Then he dies, and he notices…this death stuff sucks ass.
In what would be a horror film, Goyer goes the extra length and makes it a drama that we can all relate to – loneliness. There were probably times where you were picked last in baseball, and there were probably times where you were picked last for your job. There may have been times where you may have been watched a little bit more than what you really want to. And Goyer knows that we relate to it, and that is why we can be so easy on a film like this.
The Invisible sounds a lot like a story of my life, but Christ, at least it’s a good one.
Popularity: 3% [?]
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