My reaction to Shutter Island was... pretty good. A little meandrous around the middle, with a big enough plot twist(s) to throw the rest of the picture into question/under scrutiny. Leo and Mark Ruffalo = pretty good. Max von Sydow = great. Lots of great faces popping up here and there throughout. Good atmospherics—good enough, at least. Flashbacks and dream sequences were actually really interesting. Loved the ending, not the final shot, however—should've cut it off one before and smash-cued to the great omnious score.
The most glaring problem for me was Scorsese not fully embracing the material's B-ness, a la Cape Fear. In other words, whereas Cape Fear was balls-to-the-wall B, Shutter Island ends up as a placid B+, making for an overlong, half-ass thinking man's thriller. Horror? Not really. Psychological? Sometimes. B? Certainly not enough.
But if something did live up to that delicious B-pedigree it had to be good ol' Ted Levine. Playing nothing more than a bit part, Levine gets one little speech in before the third act, and man, is it killer. For all intensive purposes, it shall go down as the "violence speech." After being pigeonholed into boring-as-heck 'Chief' roles for the past eternity, it's nice to see him get his crazy on again. Reminded me of how great he was in Nowhere to Run (and of course Silence of the Lambs). What an actor.
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Secondly, my personally-much anticipated Give 'Em Hell Malone, with which I'll be short. A complete disappointment. Seriously, just watch the great trailer again and call it a day (as with Black Dynamite, flawless advertising doomed a far inferior film). Completely deserving of its DTD status. Live and let it die.
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