Director: Stephen Sommers
Starring: Anton Yelchin, Addison Timlin, and Willem Dafoe
Plot: A small town clairvoyant uses his abilities as a supernatural detective.
Review:
I am a sucker for these kinds of movies. I love stories that use horror elements to make crime mysteries, even ones that piss all over their source material like Constantine. If they make their hero cynically plucky and good humored count me in as interested. Anton Yelchin fits that bill pretty well. He plays the titular hero, Odd Thomas. That’s not a nickname. First name Odd. Last name Thomas. He’s got a real Peter Parker thing going on. Between heroic scenes, he is an unassuming but charming underdog, but once he starts fighting or giving chase, he never looks out of place at all. Unfortunately, he is also saddled with a pretty extensive voice over narration. He tries to channel Bogart the best he can, but his noir cynicism just makes the voice over more wordy. Trying to make what is essentially an info dump funny and entertaining backfires almost completely. It actually feels like they were desperately trying to fill in some plot holes due to cut scenes. It just felt like it was missing narrative fat at approximately 90 minutes long.
Odd has the same psychic abilities that put his mother in a mental institution. You would think he would keep them to himself, which he sort of does, but he still has his girlfriend, Stormy (Timlin), and the chief of police (Dafoe) on his side. Odd can essentially see beyond the veil. He can see ghosts who signal him about their killers, demons who show up right before something evil happens, and the occasional bad omen. The special effects are pretty low key. The ghosts are pretty much just the actors not talking, while one bad omen had a really “keep it simple” trippiness to it. The demons look like a hybrid between lizards and cockroaches, but they are also slightly invisible. They kind of look like the ghosts of monsters, which is a surprisingly effective strategy to hide some of the budgetary restraints.
It is kind of odd (no pun intended) that there were budgetary restraints, in the first place. This was directed by Stephen Sommers, who you might know better as the filmmaker behind The Mummy remake, Van Helsing, and the first GI Joe movie. He isn’t really known for holding back, and this is probably his lowest key movie in a long time, maybe ever. Odd is investigating why there are so many demons around, but it isn’t some big supernatural apocalypse scenario. It is something human, some random act of violence which somehow to me seems scarier.
It might be hard to tell, but that’s a demon, what Odd calls a bodach
Odd Thomas is a rough road to venture down, but it has a decent enough sense of humor, which sometimes justifies the rough edges and corniness. Luckily, Anton Yelnich was really well cast in the lead. He really does bring a lot to this movie especially in its final moments, making what could have been overly-sentimental and melodramtic actually compelling.
Rating: A generous 6/10, a guilty pleasure 6/10
