FULL DISCLOSURE:
Item #1.) Before I went to this movie, I looked up the ‘twist ending’ on the internet. I was less interested in playing plot-twist games with the writer and director than I was interested in seeing a story well told. For 3 weeks, television commercials have been trumpeting the “re-introduction of the classic thriller from the creator of ‘The Ring’” — but ‘The Ring’ was a remake of a Japanese horror film directed by Hideo Nakata with a screenplay by Hiroshi Takahashi based on a novel by Kôji Suzuki. I didn’t see THEIR names anywhere, but I did see the name Ehren Kruger.
‘The Skeleton Key‘ was written by the AMERICAN re-writer of the Japanese ‘Ringu‘ (1998) — Ehren Kruger, who somehow wrote ‘Arlington Road‘ back in 1999. His ‘Ring‘ was actually very good, and there is a rumor that ‘Ring 2‘ actually had a reasonable script, before Director Nakata - one of the creators of the Japanese ‘Ringu’ - violated the thing by adding sentient reindeer and fingernails-on-chalkboard recitations of ‘Rachel!’ to David Dorfman’s dialogue. But I digress.
Item #2) A small Child, approximately 3 years old, attended the same showing as I. About halfway through the screening the child broke out of her seat, and proceeded to run up and down the theater’s central aisle, playing an improvised game of tag with her half-crippled sextogenarian father or grandfather.
The Child’s mother and brother were of no avail — Paternus had to limp up and down the aisle as the child squealed and dodged the Old Man’s advances. She continued to race around the theater a few more times even after the Old Man dragged her back to her seat.
That said, I can now resume this review and warn readers against spoilers.
Ehren Kruger is a hack.
With the exception of ‘The Ring’, all of his screenplays have had the appeal of last week’s leftovers, up to and including the script that somehow won him the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ coveted Nicholl Fellowship (’Arlington Road’). In Kruger’s teleplays, the antagonist typically flips the script with a role-reversal, and the ‘hero’ typically finds him- or herself in a 1st Class seat on his or her way to some personal hell. It happened in ‘Arlington Road’ (1999), it happened in ‘Impostor‘ (2002) and ‘Reindeer Games‘ (2000). Kruger has Shyalaman’s Disease™ and seems incapable of delivering a script without a revaluation of all story elements.
Characteristically, movies that depend on ‘twist’ endings tend to be the most linear and artificial kinds of stories — typically they are told from the solipsistic P.O.V. of one character and feature the periodic visits from other characters, whose opinions, goals and objective may, possibly differ from the central protagonist. Seldom, however do these alternative characters manage to delay the tragic ends that the protagonist seem to be bound for. Twist endings, it seems, must always betray common sense in order to defy expectations. And such is the case with ‘The Skeleton Key’.
***POSSIBLE SPOILERS BELOW***
If Kruger’s ‘Skeleton Key’ is supposed to be an accurate rendering, African-Americans in Louisiana at the turn of the last century are supposed to have been jealous enough of white children to want to pull a body-snatching routine on them. Two adults. Must be prepared to re-live their formative years in order to exact some sort of revenge on their oppressors. To be beholden and dependent upon those selfsame oppressors for another 10 years, as they repeat their maturation toward adulthood and autonomy.
As an adult, I would find it difficult to want to re-visit all of the dependency and the privations that accompany childhood. I locate a central plot-hole there, in Kruger’s script — as if two powerful members of New Orleans’ so-called HooDoo community would be willing or able to sacrifice their social standing to become young children in their employer’s caste. That’s a f@cked-up and racist supposition to make: Jack-and-Jill is one thing, but the suggestion that brujos would really prefer to be Yanquis is something else altogether.
So, Kruger follows his unspectacular Ring sequel with an unspectacular ‘Body Snatchers’ redux, using folk magic as a catalyst, rather than spores from outer space. I won’t be buying tickets to any more of Kruger’s movies —I’ll be buying tickets to the show in the next theater over, and sneaking into the Kruger feature, if not taking a two-fer at the cineplex. It’s that disappointing.
* out of 5