Dark City

About an hour into Dark City, the film's three central characters sit in a small boat, rowing slowly through a canal. One of them, a mysterious psychiatrist (Kiefer Sutherland), explains to protagonist Rufus Sewell and detective William Hurt how he was forced to serve extra-terrestrials known as The Strangers in their plans to manipulate the reality of human subjects. Sutherland prattles on for five minutes with an interminable plot summary consisting primarily of stuff most viewers should have been able to figure out by actually watching the preceding hour instead of waiting for someone to give him the gist of it. But that's the problem you face when you take a dark, existential thriller and pitch it at 15-year-olds. Alex Proyas (The Crow) begins with some intriguing ideas on the nature of identity, but he seems so afraid of losing his audience that he keeps slowing down to allow the stragglers to catch up. When he isn't afraid of losing his audience, he's afraid of boring them, which means that the climax of his psychological study becomes a ridiculously chaotic psychic battle in which Sewell and The Strangers' leader go at like Karloff and Price in The Raven. I can't even work up much enthusiasm for the look of Dark City, with its token twists added to the bleak-chic cityscapes of modern science-fantasy. Not recommended. (S. Renshaw)