Shutter Island

Martin Scorsese is in slightly unfamiliar territory here, with a weird
psychological thriller with hardly any Robert DeNiro in it at all. (To the
extent that the guy you think might be De Niro under heavy makeup is in fact
Elias Koteas under heavy makeup.)

Leonardo DiCaprio stars as a US Marshal set to investigate the disappearance of
a woman from Shutter Island, a maximum security facility which even the staff
don't seem to have decided whether it's a secure hospital or a prison. Anyone
who's played Arkham Asylum on the 360 or PS3, though, is going to recognise it
immediately.

Everything is clearly very suspicious and dodgy from the outset, with Ben
Kingsley playing a very dubious head psychiatrist. It transpires that DiCaprio
has ulterior motives for taking the case, believing there to be an unpleasant
government conspiracy, connected to the guy who killed his wife, who is
supposedly locked up here.

Things clearly get more and more bizarre, with the island lashed by storms, and
DiCaprio troubled by dreams and hallucinations of his wife, and his experiences
at the liberation of Dachau. By the end, you'll be spending a little bit of the
credits wondering what happened here today.

The film has one big weakness, and that's Leonardo DiCaprio. I'm not going to
call him out and exactly call him *crap*. That wouldn't be fair. He's about as
good in this as he ever is, and when he's at his best, he's not bad. This,
however, is a tense psychodrama where his character goes through hell and back,
questions his sanity and identity, and faces demons from his past the equal of
anything you'll see in cinema. "Not bad" isn't going to cut it here. For some
reason, Scorsese has decided that DiCaprio is his new go-to all purpose actor,
but for my money, he's not got the range, and he renders what should be an
incredible movie just an average one. If you had, and I'm really just picking a
name off the top of my head here, Philip Seymour Hoffman in this role, it'd
have been an incredible film. The script's there, the direction is there, the
supporting actors are there, it just needed a huge performance in the middle.
However, it only manages to be as strong as its weakest point, and that means
overall, the film is Not Bad. Which is a shame.