Film Review: Dragonfly (2002)

about 1 year ago (Edited)

(source: tmdb.org)

Hollywood’s attempts to recognise trends in a single successful blockbuster sometimes resemble chasing unicorns. That is the impression you might get after watching Dragonfly, a 2002 supernatural thriller by Tom Shadyac.

The protagonist is Dr. Joe Darrow (played by Kevin Costner), a Chicago physician whose pregnant wife, Emily (played by Susanna Thompson), has recently died in a traffic accident while volunteering on a humanitarian mission in Venezuela. Joe tries to cope with the loss by completely dedicating himself to hospital work. After some time, he begins to notice strange phenomena – Emily’s parrot begins to act as if Emily is still in the house, which is, in turn, besieged by dragonflies, insects with which Emily used to be obsessed. Things become even stranger at Joe’s workplace, where he becomes intrigued by stories from the paediatric oncology ward, where Emily used to work as a doctor. Many of her former patients had near-death experiences and later claimed that they received messages from Emily from “the other side.” Joe used to be a sceptic, but now he becomes convinced that Emily wants to get in touch with him and that the key to the mystery might lie in Venezuela.

Work on Dragonfly began in 2000, with the script by Brandon Camp, Mike Thompson, and David Seltzer being purchased by MGM for a mid six-figure amount in US dollars. The studio obviously became interested in a thriller about a protagonist contacting the dead after the enormous success of The Sixth Sense, which had used a similar premise. However, production stalled, and the constantly increasing budget led to the film being sold to Universal. In the end, Dragonfly failed at the box office, but the creators were probably more hurt by the brutal treatment from critics. Most of the complaints were directed at Kevin Costner, whose level of acting in the film resembled that of Steven Seagal or Keanu Reeves in some of their less inspired performances. While Costner deserved much of this criticism, director Tom Shadyac did not. His involvement in the project was somewhat unusual, as Shadyac had earned his fame with light-hearted comedies. Nevertheless, Shadyac did a much better job than Mark Pellington in The Mothman Prophecies, another film with a similar premise. Dragonfly wasn’t burdened by a director who wanted to make his film “cool” and “artsy.” The film is rather conventional in style, but this can also be applied to its content, which is drowning in clichés and predictability. The fine cinematography by Dean Semler, the number of character actors like Ron Rifkin, Kathy Bates, and Joe Morton, as well as the likeable Hawaiian locations, make Dragonfly watchable, but this isn’t enough to recommend it to viewers who have better things to do.

RATING: 3/10 (+)