Big chill
Dreamcatcher bites off more than it can chew
Hollywood serves its Stephen King movies at two kinds of franchises. Junky horror stories like The Rage: Carrie 2, which cook up shlocky scares with little concern for nutritional value, are the fast-food joints. But the classy ones like Misery or The Shawshank Redemption, which cast Oscar-friendly actors and go light on the supernatural, are like expense-account restaurants where you could take a date.
Dreamcatcher, the latest King adaptation, tastes like a recipe meant for the take-out stand but cooked at the fancy place. No matter where prepared, the material would be hard to swallow, with its bizarre blend of grisly violence and bathroom humor, alien invasion and boyhood nostalgia, military psychos and mentally disabled saints. Director Lawrence Kasdan brings to Dreamcatcher such slick competence and serious intent that it’s surprisingly effective, until it collapses under the weight of its own weirdness.
A Maine hunting trip provides a reunion for four thirtysomething buddies: Jonesy (Damian Lewis), Henry (Thomas Jane), Beaver (Jason Lee) and Pete (Timothy Olyphant). Kasdan, most famous for directing The Big Chill, reveals a keen sense of the ribbing and chatty rhythms of old pals as they hang out in a remote cabin.
The male bonding doesn’t just involve beer and rifles. In the past, they befriended a handicapped boy called Duddits (Donnie Wahlberg), who somehow passed along subtle psychic abilities to each of them. In the present, they’re unwittingly in the path of a malign alien force, which sends every mammal in the woods high-tailing past their front porch. They try to help delirious strangers plagued with red discolorations and otherworldly flatulence, until they corner a monstrosity in their own toilet bowl.
We get a little exposition from two covert military officers, decent Capt. Underhill (Tom Sizemore) and unstrung Col. Curtis (Morgan Freeman), whose eagle-wing eyebrows hint at his crazed mental state. They’ve been sent to destroy a downed alien spacecraft that’s spreading an icky illness, as well as detain, with Ashcroft-like disdain for civil liberties, any innocents who may have been infected.
Dreamcatcher offers moments of unexpected delicacy, like the sweet use of the song “Blue Bayou” or the single snowflake that drifts down to land on Beaver’s glasses, presaging a winter storm. And the script toys with some heady concepts, particularly when Jonesy talks about his “memory warehouse,” and how, every time he learns something new, he throws something out. In a visual interpretation of a mental construct, we actually see Jonesy in a cluttered warehouse, throwing out boxes labeled “rock lyrics.”
But as the four friends contend with fanged monsters and rogue soldiers, Dreamcatcher’s would-be horrific moments turn ludicrous, including a “yellow snow” joke featuring an eel-like creature dubbed a “shit weasel.” One of the quartet gets taken over by an evil intelligence that speaks in an inexplicable English accent. By the time Dreamcatcher builds to its last-act chase scenes, with helicopter gunships and sperm-like larvae, the film feels like a madhouse comedy with the punchlines removed.
To appreciate Dreamcatcher, it helps to know that it was the first novel King wrote after his near fatal auto-accident. That explains the film’s recurring leg injuries, with Jonesy nearly dying in traffic early on. And that may account for why the novelist, after a painful recuperation, would fill a work with images of physical betrayal: Victims either lose control of their bowels or aliens take over their bodies.
Given such an eccentric source, it’s surprising that co-scripters Kasdan and William Goldman stay so faithful it. They take a few liberties to streamline the story but you wish they’d taken more, as Dreamcatcher has enough plot for three films, and it strains to juggle its rules for both extraterrestrial infection and extrasensory perception. Suspenseful yet often laughable, Dreamcatcher proves a game but misguided effort to film a work that was probably more of a catharsis for its author than its audience.