Shutter Shutter Island

So predictable that a trip to the bathroom, even a long one, will not cause you to lose the plot. Leo DeTitanico is on another sinking ship, stinking up the screen as a US Marshall called to the Island to investigate an insane asylum patient’s disappearance. You will guess every plot point 10 minutes before it happens. When you see the asylum administrator smile, you will think “boy. I bet he’s hiding a secret,” and you will be right. When Leo’s partner asks him to reveal something a patient told Leo, you will think “boy. I bet that partner is not what he seems,’ and you will again be correct. And about half-an-hour-to-an-hour in, when you think to yourself, “boy. I have a sinking suspicion I’m out eight bucks and two-and-a-half hours of my life,” give yourself a mental cigar, you have hit it out of the ballpark yet again. Of course there’s the usual unexpected major plot twist, which you will also figure out. If you are lucky, you will also see this major twist only 10 minutes before it happens, instead of an hour ahead like I did, and then had to endure the rest of the movie. With nothing in the plot to distract me, I focused on a band-aid on Leo’s head, which stayed on him through rain and wind and other tribulations with a stick-to-itiveness which was almost unnerving.

Ben Kingsley appears as Ben Kingsley, asylum administrator, who behaves creepily like Ben Kingsley. Max Von Sydow, who played Death in the Seventh Seal, reprises his role, only now he looks closer to it as a fuzzy old Doctor who may (you will predict) have a secret too. With Mark Ruffalo playing Leo’s affable sidekick, Marshall Affable.

Note: the audience at our movie theatre also stunk. Constantly on their cell phones and miniputers tweeting and texting each other, and giggling about it. This disgusting phenomenon has been on the rise lately, and may be enough to drive this reviewer out of the screenhouse altogether if it is not checked. The perfect cherry to top of the banana split of stink was an actual odiferous customer, whose perfume wafted through the theatre like a toxic miasma, causing more even more cringing in the audience than anything on screen.

- Gavin B.