Frailty

This movie is a wasted opportunity. Most of the movie is intense, physcologically wound, and it carries a unique plot and has a grotesque and enrapturing central theme. However the movie fails. Fails because it does not continue exploring its darker themes and because it ends on the wrong note.

From the beginning the movie is a thriller, yet I was drawn in by the characters, by the scared boy, loving his father but horrified. I was drawn by the mixture of fear and love, by the horror of the actions committed, by the father's own torn compassions.

But, then Hollywood took over. As Johnny Depp says in Secret Window "The ending is the most important part of the story", and so the ending of this movie completely undermines it.

It was a pathetic plot twist, but even more than that it was completely, and utterly unneccessary. Paxton had the novel where he needed it, he could have ended it with the two boys sitting in the rose garden, but for some reason he chose to go a different path. The movie suddenly turns and sympathizes with the father, and even more unsettlingly, validates him in his murderous and unsettled actions. It turns a powerful and natural melodrama, which the movie had definitely been up until that point, and turns it into something else, something cheaper, and its done simply to give the audience an ever cheaper shot of surprise.

The sudden revelation of the FBI agents murder of his mother, (and what's more for no apparent motivation), in an almost ridiculous looking scene turns the movie over on its head and into a petty farce. But the final nail in the coffin is Matthew McConaughey's character staring into the camera at the end, holding his wife and wearing a Sheriff's uniform looking completely happy and completely sane, and saying "May God's will be done" in what may be the cheesiest closing line of a movie ever. Few movies have fallen so much in their last fifteen minutes as this one did, and so therefore, unfortunately, because the ending is so important, these last few scenes over shadow the dark and powerful earlier scenes, the horrific and eeiry magical nature the movie did have. The ending, with its cheap plot twist, calls into validity the of the entire movie's narrative up until that point, calls into question the very storyline that was so powerful and moving. Simply an unfortunate diasppointment to what had been a very pleasant surprise.