High school senior Nick Powell (Justin Chatwin), who plans to ditch his finals and jet off to London for a writers’ symposium, is brutally attacked the day before he is scheduled to leave. Left for dead by Annie Newton (Margarita Levieva), his school’s resident criminal kingpin, Nick enters a limbo-like world, walking the Earth as a ghost.

As he watches the police futilely search for his body, Nick comes to realize that only Annie can bring his spirit home; the more Nick tries to reach her, the more apparent it becomes the two share a bond, and Annie struggles to atone for her actions and bring Nick back to the land of the living.

CRITIQUE

The Invisible is one damned odd duck of a movie. It’s ostensibly a supernatural thriller, but it’s set in a world that’s a cross between a Bret Easton Ellis novel and your average angst-ridden high school flick. If you think that sounds intriguing, you’d be wrong. This movie’s practically a poster child for flicks that somehow manage to satisfy absolutely no one.

The Invisible is a remake of a 2002 Swedish film, which was based on a novel the title of which I’m too lazy to look up. Had I not known going in it was based on a foreign film, it still wouldn’t have been too hard to figure out. There are elements here you won’t find in your average Hollywood movie, and these clash quite violently with the more conventional Hollywood elements, which pretty much kills the movie before it has a chance to actually get up and running. Not that it ever gets up and running. The entire movie, from writing and directing on down to the acting, is an exercise in lethargy.

I became annoyed fairly early on, what with all of the standard bull about how our hero is misunderstood by everyone, especially his mother, who for some reason doesn’t want him to spread his wings. Can’t she see how profound (read: pretentious) he is? And can’t she see how he still hasn’t come to terms with his father’s death? Problem is, the movie never makes us want to care about him.

Other than the standard he’s-a-teenager-so-nobody-understands-him boilerplate, there’s nothing to explain why Nick is the way he is. He writes poetry that reveals the depths of his soul, but he also has a prosperous business selling pilfered tests and papers, which is this movie’s idea of a complex character. The filmmakers also want to paint him as an outsider, yet he’s always at the big parties, and he has an attractive girlfriend who’s willing to give it up. That’s not complex, it’s ill-conceived.

The same is also true for Annie. Sure, she’s a criminal, and she’s willing to kill a guy she believes ratted her out, but she’s really a good person at heart--just look at how much she loves her little brother. Give me a break. And you only have to take one look at Annie to chart the arc of the character. She’s always shown wearing a sock hat or a hoody, and the only reason teenage girls in movies were sock hats or hoodies is so they can eventually take them off, let their curly locks fall free and reveal themselves to be beautiful. (Sock hats and hoodies have apparently replaced nerdy glasses as the accoutrements of choice for girls who go from ugly duckling to swan over the course of a movie.) I took one look at her and knew this would eventually happen, and the movie didn’t disappoint.

All of this leads to the most ridiculous scene in the movie, in which ghost-Nick follows Annie into a rave, watches her remove her hoody, let her hair down, and then begin to dance in slow motion, the one bright light in the building fixed squarely on her. Doesn’t matter than she and her goons savagely beat him and left him for dead, he takes one look at her unfettered locks and goes all gaga. (You’d think he’d at least spend some time spying on her while she’s undressing or showering, but such things seem not to matter to him.) Had Annie not savagely beaten Nick and left him for dead, it’s possible these two could have had a future together. How deep.

Maybe undiscriminating teenagers who think the world doesn’t understand them and immediately latch onto any movie about teenagers who think the world doesn’t understand them will latch onto this one, but I hope not. I would hope they’d see just how silly, artificial and contrived the whole thing is. The plot machinery that eventually leads to the misunderstanding that gets the really-a-nice-girl-at-heart Annie to savagely beat the Mike-Damone-with-the-soul-of-a-poet Nick is laughably constructed.

Speaking of Nick, if, after becoming a ghost, he quickly realizes no one can see or hear him, why does he keep getting in peoples’ faces and yelling at them? And if he has no physical affect on an object, what does he hope to accomplish by moving his own body? Speaking of the body, if the cops suspect Annie had something to do with Nick’s disappearance, why don’t they haul her in and interrogate her? All they do here is go to her house and ask her a couple of questions. Better (or perhaps dumber) yet, why do they let her run off after she’s threatened several people, including a few cops, with a gun? And speaking of guns, can a teenage girl really take a couple of rounds and still drive through a police roadblock and then get out and run a couple of miles?         

The performances are, for the most part, awful. Chatwin fails to register. Levieva, whose facial expressions range from relentlessly grim to grimly relentless, can’t generate menace or pathos. You can give her a knife, you can give her a gun, but she still comes across as one of those bad girls you see on dumb sitcoms, the ones who spend all their time in school restrooms trying to get the good girls to smoke. But as bad as they are, they somehow manage to come off better than Marcia Gay Harden, who looks and acts as though she’s been shot full of elephant tranquilizers. It’s like she’s doing her best to join Lou Gossett and Halle Berry on the list of Oscar winners who deserve to have their statues revoked.

I’ve been trying to think of something good to say about The Invisible, and here’s the only thing I can come up with: it’s better than director David Goyer’s last movie. Of course, Goyer’s last movie was the howlingly awful Blade: Trinity, and it would take real talent to make a movie worse than that one.

I don’t think Goyer will ever be a good director (just like he’ll never truly be a good writer), but at least here he has some understanding of what to do with a camera, even if he does overdo the sweeping crane and show-offy Steadicam shots. Goyer and cinematographer Gabriel Beristain make the Vancouver locations (which still look very little like the U.S.) look quite beautiful, providing the visuals with the sort of polish and craft the movie lacks in virtually every other area.

THE VIDEO

The 2.35:1/1080p transfer is quite good, although some haloing (possibly a result of the somewhat soft photography) and edge enhancement are noticeable. Colors, which are generally muted, look excellent, and there’s a nice pop to the lush greens of the Vancouver foliage. Blacks are solid, and the level of detail is strong.

THE AUDIO

The uncompressed PCM 5.1 audio is also strong, although it’s a little on the subdued side. The mix doesn’t feature the sort of silly, clichéd aural stings you find in most modern supernatural thrillers, relying instead on an ever-present ambience. Music, both Marco Beltrami’s score and the ubiquitous pop songs that make up the soundtrack (it wouldn’t be a teen flick without a Death Cab for Cutie song), are spread throughout the soundstage.

Bass, where appropriate, is deep and tight. The only flaw in the track is some unintelligible dialogue; whispered lines are sometimes difficult to make out. English, French, and Spanish Dolby Digital 5.1 tracks are also included. English, French, and Spanish subtitles are available.

THE EXTRAS

The extras kick off with a pair of commentary tracks, the first featuring director David Goyer and co-writer Christine Roum, the second a solo track from co-writer Mick Davis. Both are dry, boring, and uninformative.

A selection of deleted scenes (13 minutes total), which are primarily scene extensions, is also included. They do nothing to further the plot or deepen the characters. Goyer and Roum provide optional commentary for these scenes.

Closing out the extras are two music videos, one for Sparta’s “Taking Back Control” (essentially a montage of footage from the movie), the other for the live version of 30 Seconds to Mars’s “The Kill” (which is good for a few laughs as frontman Jared Leto--who’s too lazy to sing the song himself and asks the audience to do it for him--is wearing makeup that makes him look like the love child of Boy George and Robert Smith).

FINAL THOUGHT

The Invisible is a dull, unsatisfying mess. It’s not even worthy of a rainy day, there’s-nothing-else-in-the-store rental.