It's hard to fully dislike a movie like Shutter, that tries so hard to make an earnest impression upon its audience. The movie--this time brought to us via a retread of a Thai film of the same name--was constructed by virtually every producer who ever worked on The Grudge and The Ring series of films (including the upcoming Grudge 3 and Ring 3...seriously, when are you guys gonna whip out the baby oil and mud pit, and just get Yoko and Samara together already?) with execu-tive producer Sonny Mallhi(The Lake House, the upcoming The Strangers) overseeing while Masayuki Ochiai(Parasite Eve, Kansen) directed.
Still, the fault may lie with the script, which is very much a paint-by-numbers production and might help to explain why scriptwriter Luke Dawson, whose only other credit is 2003's New York Stories, hasn't worked in half a decade.
It also doesn't help that the movie itself is hampered by two leads of only marginally passable acting skill. Rachael Taylor(Transformers) and Joshua Jackson(Dawson's Creek, Cursed) play Jane and Benjamin Shaw, newlyweds who fly to Japan immediately after getting married because Ben is a professional photographer who's just landed a big shoot with a major company overseas. Taylor is only present though to really just be eye candy; aside from looking great in a PG-13 sex scene, we know nothing about her Jane other than she's married to Ben and has just received her degree to teach 6th grade English. There's one oblique reference made to her father which needs followup but never receives it, as said reference(brought up by Ben) is never mentioned ever again. As this lack of characterization goes, Taylor is the perfect acting cipher to play someone we're barely able to attach ourselves to emotionally. As for Jackson, he's never been a particularly good actor, and only managed to achieve a slight measure of stardom by playing the creepier-looking of the two male leads on Dawson's Creek. He should have stayed on the smaller projecting box, since he doesn't possess near-ly enough presence to even come close to filling a movie screen.
This dreadful casting aside, some credit must go to Ochiai for starting the film right off and just going with it. The old writing adage is "Enter a scene as late as possible and leave as early as possible", and the director doesn't play around; we pick up Ben as he's finishing the last sentence of his speech at the cake-cutting, and jump immediately into the couple going to Japan for his job. Once there, we are shown that Ben is a highly sought after and respected photograph-er--an inference one wouldn't be able to get simply from Jackson's impossibly poor performance. Watching Jackson handle a camera and "organize" several model shoots(and listening to Luke Dawson's cliched "photographer shoots model" dialogue), makes one ponder if he knows books on photography even exist, let alone if he's ever picked one up for reference. We are also introduced to two of Ben's friends, Bruno(David Denman) and Adam(John Hensley), who work at the large Japanese company that hired Ben. Bruno and Adam are skirt-chasers, and this "character aspect" will come into play later in the story during the "big reveal", which is actually more than a standard twist in most recent Asian-to-American horror flops(Pulse, One Missed Call, and more to come).
Soon after their arrival however, while out driving one night the couple gets lost while Jane's at the wheel and their car hits a young woman who suddenly wanders into the road. The car then spins out of control into a tree, and when they come to their senses they search for the woman but can't find her body. Even the arriving authorities find no trace of her, so eventually Jane allows herself to believe she was mistaken in thinking she hit a person rather than possibly a passing animal(because, y'know, Sika Deer always walk upright). This being the Land of the Rising Sun though, we all know the territory is just rife with spirits full of unrest, and before long Jane begins finding images of the young woman appearing in virtually any picture taken by Ben. She appears as both a full figure and a waft of light, and it is the second spectral shape which almost costs Ben his job. That's nothing however, com-pared to the major haunting the ghost--reluctantly revealed by Ben to be named Megumi(played by Megumi Okina from Ju-on, the original Japanese version of The Grudge)--begins putting on Jane. The terror forces Jane at first to seek out a medium and expert on the subject named Murase(Kei Yama-moto), who begins to freak out after meditating on the pictures containing Megumi's image. Again both Dawson's script and in this instance, director Ochiai, let us down by never having Ben(who speaks Japanese) admit to us what it is that Murase tried to tell Jane about the images.
Shutter isn't necessarily a bad film...like a camera with its f-stop set too low, its story is underexposed, not quite finish-ed, at least from a technical level. Yes, the story has the appropriate setting(Japan). Handsome-yet-generic leads facing a vengeful spirit, with spare friends standing by waiting for their last call...check. Possible connection between one of the married couple and the deceased...yup. There are even a couple of surprising, genuinely good scares--even though one of them is almost expected, it arrives with a twist(definite rarity)! And the ending delivers both a strong moral message (surprising) and a somewhat ironic touch. Even with all this going for it though, the ineptly written script and bad acting will leave almost any audience flat. And overall, even with its somewhat different take on the subject matter, this isn't any type of ghost story we haven't seen before, or not done better; It's just more of the same.
And after a while, enough's enough.
Official Archives of LanceReviews...
SPUTTER
New horror film almost finds its mark...and then...
Shutter's print ad: because nothing says horror like a half dressed babe with great legs.
See Jane(Taylor). See Ben(Jackson). See Jane and Ben be terrified. See the audience. See the audience not be terrified. Yawn audience, yawn!
Eschewing past examples like Samara from The Ring and Yoko from The Grudge, Shutter's Megumi(Tanaka) attempts to bring the practice of wearing shoes back into fashion for ghosts.
"It's all your fault! I said I didn't wanna wait, because of you I did, and now my life is over! Do-do-do-do-do-do!"
