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75In trash as in art there is no accounting for taste, and reader, I cherished this movie in all of its lurid glory.
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75Kassovitz directs with an unrelenting intensity that helps you to suspend disbelief almost all the way to the credits.
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70Delivers genuine scares.
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50For a while there, Mathieu Kassovitz's atmospherically charged direction sucks the viewer into the story's hellish vortex. That is until the film becomes possessed by an increasingly ludicrous beyond-the-grave element from which there is no rational return.
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50May try to revive the eerie spirit of the Gothic novel, but, unless you're suffering from amnesia yourself, it probably won't surprise or thrill you.
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50Great cast, great atmosphere, little sense or first-rate suspense.
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50If you try hard enough, you might be able to forget that the story doesn't make a lot of sense or provide adequate thrills, although it tries to scare you a couple of times in the cheapest possible way.
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50For those who want nothing more than a thorough scare, Gothika is effective. But for those of us who want some psychological insight with our frightfests, the film is sadly lacking.
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50The movie gets a mild boost when her escape briefly takes it from just another crummy supernatural thriller into an OK escape melodrama, albeit one dependent on a whopper of an unlikely occurrence.
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50A plot that insults, betrays, and cheats every member of the audience. Stupidity to a degree can sometimes be forgiven. Stupidity to this degree can not and should not.
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50Gothika deserves credit for embracing the ghost story genre so whole-heartedly, but as any ten-year-old girl can tell you, there's nothing original here to see.
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50There must be something about the thriller/horror genre that attracts writers with exactly the same dysfunctional tendencies: They're all great at the foreplay but keep on messing up the climax.
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50Silly stuff, made all the more regrettable by the apparent skill with which the movie was made everywhere but in the screenplay department. The sheer lunkheadedness of Sebastian Gutierrez's script is impossible to ignore.
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50Gothika was supposed to provide proof that she (Berry) could carry a film as a leading lady, but it doesn't. That's not entirely her fault, since nobody can fetch a drink of water in a sieve.
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50Comes from the same jolly homage-to-schlock-shock producers who remade ''House on Haunted Hill,'' and the emphasis is shamelessly on ornate scares. But with its high-gloss cast and French art-house actor and director Mathieu Kassovitz (''Hate'') in charge, the movie also shoots for class.
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50Kassovitz can't control the ridiculous script and messy tone. And though it's not exactly hard to watch Berry run around in a hospital robe (Cruz and Berry: That's one good-looking mental ward), it's not particularly profound.
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50Given her (Halle Berry) biggest part since winning Oscar, she responds with a zeal that's more than the movie deserves.
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40A gloomy-doomy ghost story that gets off to a creepy start and then spirals into flat-out preposterousness.
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40Gothika never delivers anything more than the occasional, cynically engineered jolt and often drifts close to provoking giggles.
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40A film that is long on atmosphere, but short on smarts: Plot points are easily unraveled 20 minutes in advance (no fun sleuthing for the audience here), the ending is an unsatisfying pastiche off too many horror tropes, and it would take a week to plug all of Gothika’s gaps in logic.
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40More of a women's-prison movie than a supernatural thriller, and not a very good one at that.
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40While stylistic excess keeps Gothika mildly diverting, though suspense-and horror-free, Kassovitz can't do anything to keep the film's ending from degenerating into camp.
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Quickly abandoning the psychological for the supernatural, the movie collapses its premise into one painfully derivative pitch.
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40Hampered by thinly developed characters and pedestrian plotting.
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40Ms. Berry works hard in her role, generating some excitement in the course of her distress. But the story's convolutions can't cover a deficit of substance, or sense.
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40Dopey, violent horror thriller.
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38French director Mathieu Kassovitz Frenches this flimsy tale to death. No scene goes underplayed, no performance (save one, from Robert Downey Jr.) lacks volume, no horror cliche is forgotten.
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38For most of the movie, however, Halle sprints, Halle swims (55 laps!), and Halle screams. It's a two-hour fitness video -- a portrait of the Oscar winner as personal trainer.
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30The best they were able to manage, apparently, was a grabbag of spectral sights and spooky touches grabbed from better horror films and a final act that raises more questions than it answers.
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30How anyone in the cast manages to keep a straight face is one of the film's innumerable mysteries.
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30Proves to be both too much and not enough: yet another slick, empty package of ersatz entertainment.
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30They go about scaring you, but only in the most hackneyed and cheap-shock manner.
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30An unsurprising, undistinguished piece of post-summer, pre-holiday detritus.
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25Stupefyingly stupid thriller.
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25The movie spins further and further into coincidence and incoherence.
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Tolerable for undiscriminating horror fans but should be shunned by everybody else.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 21 out of 40
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Mixed: 4 out of 40
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Negative: 15 out of 40
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