Wacky’s Movie Review: Shutter Island

Featured — February 23, 2010 at 14:12

The Plot

Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo play Teddy Daniels and Chuck Aule, a couple of US Marshals who are assigned to go to Shutter Island to investigate the disappearance of a murderous mental hospital patient/inmate who was put there for being criminally insane. The hospital is in an eerily remote location and, although the original purpose was to find out about the disappearance case, the investigators find more sinister matters than they bargained for. The hospital’s doctors are less than helpful and things grow increasingly more bizarre after a hurricane occurs, stranding the marshals and opening the door to more chaos.

Daniels struggles to discover what the truth is, but will he lose his sanity in the process?

The Good

* Come on, it’s a Martin Scorsese film- Of course, it’s good!.
* Leonardo DiCaprio delivers an excellent performance, proving himself once again to have the old school type of star quality largely absent in today’s Hollywood
* The rest of the cast, including Mark Ruffalo, Patricia Clarkson, Michelle Williams, Max von Sidow and Ben Kingsley, is top of the line
* Kind of Gothic in look and feel
* Embodies, in style and plot, a sort of color version of film noir
* Uses flashback sequences effectively, unlike lesser flicks that make them intrusive
* Quite simply, this is filmmaking at its best. Scorsese continues to set a higher standard than many of his peers seem capable of matching.

The Not-So-Bad

* Intriguing from start to finish
* Hitchcock would be proud

The Kinda’ Ugly

* I wish that there had been some way Scorsese could have cast Joe Pesci in this. Imagine how good he would have been as a deranged mental patient.
* Everything doesn’t get resolved rapidly, so, if you only want quick fixes plot-wise in a movie, you may not have the patience to wait things out