Not much to see in ‘The Invisible’
Perhaps you’ve seen the trailers for “The Invisible,” which opened Friday sans advance screenings for critics. If so, you may remember the scary part, in which the creepy old blind man in the hospital turns to young Nick Powell (Justin Chatwin), whom we’ve just seen assaulted and left for dead, and spells out the plot. “You’ll never be seen again,” he says. “They can’t touch you. They can’t hear you. But if you can solve the mystery of your own death, then you’ll have the chance to live again.”
Sounds pretty good, in that “Brought to you by the producers of ‘The Sixth Sense’ ” sort of way, except that it never happens. (Nor, among other misleading claims, was the movie produced, technically speaking, by the producers of “The Sixth Sense.”) The old man who sees dead people is exclusive to the trailer -- he never appears in the film, and neither, for that matter, does the mystery.
Who did what to Nick, when and why is spelled out in big block letters about 40 minutes into the film, at which point you’ll have despaired of ever seeing the supernatural thriller you were promised, and settled instead into a teen-angst drama about the tension between wealthy, privileged kids and their extremely implausible counterparts. Nick’s antithesis is Annie (Margarita Levieva), a girl with the face of an angel, the wardrobe of a ninja cat burglar, the psychopathic tendencies of a lunatic criminal, the back story of a Dickensian moppet and the character believability of a unicorn-riding, dragon-slaying leprechaun. Convinced that it was Nick and his friend Pete (Chris Marquette) who tipped the police to her recent jewelry heist, she beats him, hides the body and leaves him for dead.
Nick discovers that he’s suspended in some kind of limbo between life and death when he shows up for class one day and his classmates are discussing one of his poems as though he weren’t there. Nick is condemned to stalking around his house, his high school and his town, yelling at people who can’t see or hear him and trying to lead them to his body. Marcia Gay Harden is wasted as Nick’s domineering mother. Directed by David S. Goyer and written by Mick Davis and Christina Roum (based on a Swedish film of a novel by Mats Wahl), “The Invisible” is little more than an extended excuse for a soundtrack.
*
MPAA rating: PG-13 for violence, criminality, sensuality and language -- all involving teens. Running time: 1 hour, 37 minutes. In general release.
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