There are a lot of talented people involved in Death Note. Director Adam Wingard has made some celebrated genre films, including the fantastic The Guest. Netflix, with their excellent track record, picked it up for distribution. Talented actors like Shea Whigham are present. Willem Dafoe voices a cackling, porcupine-quilled demon. Young star Nat Wolff has cool hair.
Despite all this, Death Note is a very, very bad movie on nearly every level. The biggest problem is the script, which tells a bafflingly stupid story about high schoolers who come into possession of a book (presented by Dafoe’s demon) with dangerous powers: when a person’s name is entered on its weathered pages, they die. Sounds simple enough, but 3 screenwriters working off a Japanese manga clutter the book’s seemingly straight-forward capabilities with an endless series of conflicting, arbitrary rules as a means of furthering a ludicrous plot. As our main character keeps complaining, “There’s so many rules!”
All of Death Note’s half-baked plot line are clumsy failures, including attempts at a doomed teen romance and a highly unconvincing global crisis. There is no character development, almost no one acts logically, and there are plot holes so large you can sense Wingard trying to cover them up with disorienting zooms, canted camera angles, slo-mo, and desperate needle drops. Poor Lakeith Stanfield is stuck portraying one of the worst, most ridiculous characters I’ve ever seen, a candy-addicted superhuman detective right out of the canceled pilot for a CBS procedural.
Wingard, who has previously displayed a visual style and eccentric touch reminiscent of John Carpenter, over-directs the shit out of Death Note. The film maniacally races from one incoherent scene to another, shedding intelligence by the second. The all-or-nothing gore – some deaths are gruesomely depicted, while others occur offscreen as if the film was edited down for a non-existent PG-13 rating – is just watered-down Final Destination rip-offs. Even the credits, which inexplicably reward the audience with behind-the-scenes outtakes as if you had just watched Scary Movie 6, are embarrassingly bad. This is just such a misguided, poorly executed movie.
The main character, by the way, is named Light Turner. This is adapted from the manga and is the sort of thing that I could’ve perhaps overlooked in a better film.
There is so little to praise here. One of the only kind things I can say about Death Note is that it is so strange, so unexpectedly awful, that it retains a general watchability until a final act in which the incompetence becomes simply boring. Even the last shot, including a tag line which was either intended as revelatory or funny (it’s neither), is bound to induce an eye-roll or a confused grimace. Fortunately for Wingard, before this film’s release he was chosen for the upcoming blockbuster, Godzilla vs. King Kong. Here’s hoping that film is big and loud enough to distract from this disaster.
arthousegrindhouse.wordpress.com 