Review – Shutter Island

Martin Scorsese helms an uneven blend of pretty pictures, mediocre acting and bad writing. Of course even Shakespeare couldn’t have saved a premise as dreadful as this. A marshal (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his partner arrive at an asylum for the criminally insane to search for a patient who escaped from a locked cell. And if you’re now asking yourself “why would an escaped mental patient be a concern to the U.S. Marshal Service?” then you’ve got your first taste of the deliberate absence of logic that pervades the entire picture. This “nothing makes sense because everything’s a delusion” approach to storytelling makes it impossible to care about the characters or the probably imaginary problems they face. Though Scorsese commands a big budget and a stellar cast, everyone involved has done better work elsewhere. The result treads some of the same ground as Hitchcock’s Spellbound without being anywhere near as good. See if desperate