Reel Critics

Clem Dominguez

Richard Gere plays a Washington Post reporter in this supposedly scary

movie about an unseen but very noisy monster dubbed the Mothman.

Gere and his wife, played by Debra Messing of TV’s “Will and Grace,”

are driving along one night after a very happy marital event. She sees a

flash of red light (apparently Mothman generated) and swerves to avoid

it, but crashes into a wall. Gere is unharmed but Messing is badly hurt.

Gere thinks he’s going crazy. He teams up with Laura Linney, a cop in

a small town in West Virginia, to try to uncover the mystery he and the

town share over seeing this Mothman creature.

Newspaper advertisements for the movie say its “Heart-Stoppingly

Scary.” The only thing heart stopping about this movie is likely to be

the box office receipts. The monster isn’t seen in enough detail to scare

anybody. It surrounds people in a red light and they learn that some

tragedy is about to happen, but they don’t know exactly what. The most

physical harm the monster does is to give them a bloody ear.

Gere is fine as the lost and confused person trying to find answers,

and Linney was believable as the small town compassionate cop. Alan Bates

was so-so as the person most haunted by the Mothman. It seemed he was

just going through the motions and I really had a hard time caring about

what happened to him.

There was also the doctor who wrote the book on this creature who Gere

goes to see. Seems like I’ve seen this relationship of the metaphysical

expert called into to explain a strange phenomenon just too many times.

What drove me nuts was the shifting camera angles and choice of camera

shots. It was a little like “The Blair Witch Project” with better

photography. The music was also overly dramatic as if they tried to

compensate for the lack of suspense in the story.

There were also a couple of important issues that were never resolved.

For instance finding out how Gere was able to drive so many miles in such

a short time. The other one was the Mothman’s motivation.

I would pass on this one and hope we never see the Mothman again. It

gets ‘D’ for dumb.* CLEM DOMINGUEZ, 57, is an aspiring screenwriter and

film fanatic.