Review by Ben Bussey
“I may see dead people – but then by God, I do something about it.” I won’t deny, as statement-of-intent one-liners go, it’s not a bad one. I haven’t read the 2003 Dean Koontz novel on which this movie is based, but I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that line comes direct from the book: after all, given it was published only a few years after The Sixth Sense – you remember, back in the days when everyone thought M Night Shyamalan was going to be the next Spielberg (ah, were we ever so young) – it would have had a far more timely pop cultural resonance. Indeed, the prevailing mood of Odd Thomas is a desperation to capture the zeitgeist for the young and trendy new wave of horror fans who sprang up in the wake of Scream and Buffy. A hero can’t simply do battle with a monster; they have to come out with a plethora of overly-verbose witticisms first, simultaneously satirising and celebrating US pop culture.
It also helps to challenge a few stereotypes along the way. Where Scream and Buffy re-cast the whimpering female victim as a badass survivor, Odd Thomas takes a fairly dweeby college-age boy and turns him into a tough, street-smart avenger for the recently deceased. It’s kind of a fun idea… but I suspect it would have seemed a great deal fresher a decade ago.
Anton Yelchin (Chekov/Kyle Reese/Charley Brewster 2.0) takes the title role of Odd – yes, Odd is his actual first name, which I’ve no doubt is meant to seem extraordinarily wacky. He has a humble life in many respects, living simple in a small town, working the grill at the local greasy spoon (do you guys use that term in America?), but unbeknownst to most he has inherited from his long-since institutionalised mother the ability to see ghosts. Among the few to know about it are the local police chief (Willem Defoe) with whom he has something of a father/son relationship; Odd’s abilities result in him being involved in a great many unsolved cases. Also in the know is Odd’s girlfriend, bearing the similarly colourful moniker Stormy (Addison Timlin), who works at a mall ice cream parlour and is equally adept at overly verbose witticisms, as well as looking cute in pink short-shorts.
It starts out like any other week – Odd chases down and beats the shit out of a child murderer twice his size, then heads to work and cooks eggs in an unnecessarily showy manner, the way Tom Cruise in Cocktail might do it – but then a mysterious stranger shows up surrounded by what Odd calls bodachs; nasty-looking phantoms which, of course, only Odd can see. Obviously Odd and Penny get their Scooby Gang investigating caps on, and soon come to realise that – wouldn’t you know it – the world’s going to be destroyed if they don’t act fast.
Sounds uncannily like the set-up for a TV show, doesn’t it? And that’s a significant part of the problem. With its emphasis on setting up quirky characters and establishing a cosy little community in which everybody knows everybody else, Odd Thomas feels less like a movie than a pilot episode – and, to be frank, not a terribly inspiring pilot episode at that. Take Charmed, The Ghost Whisperer and Smallville, throw them in a blender and mash up very, very gently, and this is pretty much what you’d end up with, production values and all. Not that I have any major hang-ups about it being a relatively cut-price production: that’s one of the things of interest about Odd Thomas, as it’s a pretty big departure for screenwriter/director Stephen Sommers, whose name is typically attached to such megabudget, CGI-riddled blockbusters as The Mummy movies. Given how painfully overindulgent his movies generally are, it’s nice to see him take a comparative back-to-basics approach, and I can happily say I enjoyed Odd Thomas plenty more than his last two films… but as his last two movies were GI Joe and Van Helsing, that’s really, really, really not saying much.
I don’t want to be too mean about Odd Thomas, because it’s a simple movie with simple intentions, and for the most part it hits its targets. Anton Yelchin remains a thoroughly likeable actor in search of a truly great role; Willem Defoe is his usual effortlessly charismatic self; and Addison Timlin is fine as the stereotypically doting, loveable, tenacious girlfriend. But there’s just no avoiding a painful sense of been-there done-that at every turn, while the movie tries so damn hard to seem hip. The plot is a bland, uninvolving hodge-podge of overfamiliar motifs and red herrings, anxious to come off way smarter and less predictable than it actually is – none of which is helped by a supposed big shock ending that should have been blindingly obvious for at least the previous twenty minutes to anyone who’s been paying attention.
It may end on a here-comes-the-sequel note, but given the off-camera legal woes that have resulted in it going straight to DVD, I suspect it’s a one-and-done for Odd Thomas; and I rather doubt we’re missing out on much there. I guess the material is there, given Dean Koontz has written a whole series of Odd Thomas novels – but if the movie is in any way representative of the book (not a given, I’ll grant you), then I can’t say I’m in any hurry to give any of them a read.
Metrodome release Odd Thomas to Region 2 DVD on 3rd February 2014.