The Gift

Once a tongue-in-cheek sovereign of campy cult classics, director Sam Raimi went legit a couple years ago, and already he seems to have lost his soul. The Gift, his latest, is a disappointingly predictable psychic whodunit with a script so pedestrian it feels like an albatross around the necks of its marquee pedigree players. The cinematically dexterous Cate Blanchett (Elizabeth) stars as a widowed Louisiana swamp mama with an extrasensory gift who is called upon to help find the body of a murdered sexpot socialite (Katie Holmes). Haunted by visions of the dead girl, she becomes convinced the abusive redneck husband (a truly frightening Keanu Reeves) she helped put behind bars is innocent, and puts herself in danger by conspicuously poking around in a supernatural search for the real killer. The cast (including Hilary Swank and Giovanni Ribisi) is superb, but the story (written by Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Epperson) is riddled with logical loopholes and patched together with pathetically shopworn spook movie gimmicks. A real disappointment. Not a necessary purchase. (R. Blackwelder)