Rish Outfield's reviews
As with my recent reviews of The Others and Session 9, I found Dragonfly quite difficult to quantify, at least as far as Threats and Skulls and Weapons go. There are several directions I might have gone and I didn't want to feel like a cheat for the choices I made. Perhaps I should have followed the lead of The Sixth Sense and simply leave the quantifiers blank
Because The Sixth Sense is the film Dragonfly most reminded me of, and it felt obvious through its entire length that The Sixth Sense is what it wanted to be.
Kevin Costner plays Joe Darrow, a doctor who loses his wife (Susannah Thompson) in an accident. But he is unable to get closure and deal with her death, partly because of the nature of her death and partly because he begins to experience odd phenomenon--patterns, messages, signs, mysteries--that point that something is trying to communicate with him. Something from beyond the mortal realm.
I realize I may sound a little hokey with what I just wrote, and that's one of the problems I had with the film: it too sounds a little hokey at times. One scene in particular, where a nun played by Linda Hunt speaks to Joe, felt as nonsensical and expository as a campy 50s SciFi film. And while I don't share tyranist's curmudgeonly dislike for Costner, sometimes I felt his role was rather silly and his performance hard to swallow.
Clearly, the creators of this film had something they were trying to say about death, about losing a loved one, and while that is admirable, it sometimes felt forced and almost sermonal. That wasn't the main flaw in Dragonfly, however. That flaw was the aforementioned aspiration...no, NEED to be The Sixth Sense. Obviously, that film was a success in every way, be it financially, critically, or artistically, so the filmmakers borrowed a lot of its style and feel for Dragonfly. But while The Sixth Sense was a horror film that was sweet and sad, Dragonfly is a sweet, sad film forced into a Horror package. Some of the visions Joe experiences, some of the messages he receives, are so unilaterally scary that they detract from the point of the picture. A movie that wants the audience to feel that death is not the answer and love continues beyond this life shouldn't try to shock it into us. Indeed, for a scene or two, my palms were sweating and in holding onto my breath I could hear the black guy in the seat next to me chuckling nervously to himself. What this move should have been was Ghost, not Ghost Story. And that makes me realize something: maybe The Sixth Sense shouldn't have worked. Maybe it was purely an accident that it did--that we were able to feel emotionally uplifted from a film that spent its majority scaring the hell out of us. Maybe this film shows us what a serendipitous mix fear and love and death and joy, Fantasy and Drama and Horror and Romance can be. Or cannot be.
Now don't get me wrong, Dragonfly is a nice film. It took its time and had a likable cast (including the great Kathy Bates as Joe's neighbour) and pretty scenery and a sweet payoff in the end. I recommend it if it looks good to you. But it felt short of being a great movie and was really only a good one.