"Dark City" is the new film by Alex Proyas ("The Crow"), and it tries really, really hard to be dark and trippy. Unfortunately, while the film is visually stunning and haunting, more time should have been spent trying to imbue the images with meaning and the screenplay with more clever and imaginative dialogue. Instead, the film amounts to a long-form MTV video -- lots of gloss, but little art or substance.
The plot of "Dark City" is as ridiculous as they come, but, by the end of the first hour, viewers will have abandoned any hope of watching a real story unravel. This film is all about surfaces, and it is so lacking in all other areas that the best (actually, the only) way to truly enjoy this film would be if you brought a pair of earplugs into the theater.
The story, slim as it is, amounts to the trials of John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell), a man who wakes up in the bathtub one day to discover a dead prostitute in his apartment. Murdoch is accused of murdering this woman as well as a slew of other hookers, and he knows that he is not guilty.
He is chased by the police, but things get really tense when a group of bald, men in black called the Strangers start pursuing him as well. As soon as this happens, Murdoch discovers that he can project his mental wishes onto the outside world, and he is left trying to find the truth about the killings, his own identity and the presence of the Strangers. Unsurprisingly, these three mysteries are all linked.
Of course, no film about a man with a lost identity would be complete without the usual assembly line of stock characters, and they are all here. There's the femme fatale (Jennifer Connelly), the bizarre doctor (Kiefer Sutherland) who wants to defeat the bald badies and the cop (William Hurt) who chases our beleaguered hero.
For a movie that seems to pride itself on being audacious, it is startling how completely unoriginal the characters that occupy this film really are.
Worst of all is the presence of the Strangers, who we soon learn are trying to take over the world by stealing human memories in the middle of the night. The Strangers want to become intimate with the human psyche since they figure that sort of thing seems helpful for world dominance. The film's most obnoxiously stated message is that the Strangers can never understand human life by studying the mind -- those Pinhead clones need to look at the heart to discover what really makes people tick.
I am not saying that this message is not a good one, but the filmmakers foolishly decide to have all of the major themes of the film enunciated by Murdoch at some point. This serves to de-mystify the proceedings considerably and it makes the film itself less surreal.
While the Strangers are often laughable, the stunning art direction that went into constructing their world is nothing to snicker at. Visually, the film is darkly majestic and it is one of the most technically fluid movies in recent memory. One scene in which the Strangers raise buildings up from the ground in the middle of the night is truly incredible, and the film does have its fair share of exceptional visual episodes. It just has nothing to support them.
The acting certainly does not atone for any of the film's shortcomings, and the performances, with the exception of Sewell's convincing turn as Murdoch, range from fair (Connelly and Hurt) to terrible (Sutherland). Still, this is not the kind of movie that needs an Oscar-winning cast to perform the roles, and nit-picking the performances is unnecessary.
What this film could have used, to be frank, is a good laugh here or there. Some wry, understated humor would have actually complemented the film's somber mood and shown that the filmmakers are not taking themselves too seriously. Instead, the film is bogged down with pretensions, and only Marilyn Manson fans in desperate need of a bleak-fix will be truly impressed by the joyless tone.
Overall, "Dark City" is most disappointing because some of its scenes hint at a good movie dying to break out onscreen. Instead, Proyas seems to be trying too hard to be cool and ground-breaking, which is always difficult to pull off when the film's villains are unexceptional and the ending is not nearly as ironic as it thinks it is.
There are several interesting ideas in here, but they are barely allowed to seep into our consciousness before they are explained to us in full. Maybe next time Proyas will loosen up and make a movie that can be enjoyed by an audience other than the Goth teens at the mall.
