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A fairly disturbing poster for Stephen Sommers' Odd Thomas
Odd Thomas is an adaptation of the first book in a bestselling young adult fantasy series by Dean Koontz (Fear Nothing (1998)). It is a romantic teen-detective fantasy story.
Odd Thomas works in a diner but has a more important job in preventing murders and catching killers based on his clairvoyant abilities.
The film sat in a legal mess for months, and was therefore been in peril of never getting a theatrical release in the US, but that now seems to have blown over, and the film is now heading for a release in early 2014.
The
legal dispute is about the production companies behind the film and a
lot of money apparently gone 'missing'. It seems to have been resolved
now, but two of the posters available for the film right now suggest
that the marketing department for Odd Thomas is at a loss on how to sell it:
1. As a film featuring a darkly dressed Anton Yelchin (Hearts in Atlantis (2001))?
Or 2. As a scary monster film? (Which it definitely is not.)
The title character is played by Russian-American Yelchin, whom I thought I liked, - at least I admired his earlier work in movies like Fierce People (2005) and Charlie Bartlett (2007), - but whom I suspect of late of having bad taste when it comes to selecting roles, a bad agent, or both. Whether Odd Thomas - already lose in other territories and probably as an illegal download as well, - will bomb is now solely up to Yelchin's appeal with teen girls, I predict.
Yelchin as Odd is extremely annoying throughout the film. Writer-director Stephen Sommers' (Catch Me If You Can (1989)) script, - adapted from Koontz's Odd Thomas (2003), - is so heavy with narration that you'll realize fast that Odd Thomas is a dud. When Yelchin isn't explaining his actions and life in a rambling voice-over, he is speed-mouthing zingers every which way, always aggravatingly on top of things. Seeing the film, it is very hard to determine Yelchin's age, which kept my mind wandering off: He shifts between making his soft baby face, which makes me think of him as a young teenager still, and a face where he draws his lips and face in to look adult and tough. (He is 24, I later learned, and keeps getting lots of roles.)
Odd has a romance with the girl, Stormy, who also has some abilities, though they cannot measure up to his. They are "destined to be together forever", and generally talk a lot about their love. (Although the ending of the film makes this call dubious at best.)
Odd Thomas is a strange mix of violence, teen romance and ghouls. (Odd from time to time sees harmless ghouls that crawl on walls, and they are not indications of schizophrenia but solid indicators that murder and mayhem is close!) At one point he transports a decomposing body to a desolate location and leaves it there, paying as little respect to the deceased as possible, and the next day he comes back and performs a mystical surgery on the corpse, again quite disturbing stuff. - Perhaps there's something I just didn't get. Later on the film is about stopping a mall massacre, (not the work of the disturbing Odd though), while the ghouls are everywhere. At this point, the film has gotten more interesting, but it's too late to save it.
Willem Dafoe (The Boondock Saints (1999)) is a friendly police detective, who mainly porks his wife and eats in the film, but he is a small Band-Aid on Odd Thomas for all of us grown-ups, who don't want to be told how the world works from (what looks like) a teenager for 90 minutes.
The film is technically well-done, - the ghouls look strange and good, and the camera work is professional, - and it is something different for sure, as a hard-to-categorize, off-beat crime superhero teen flick. But it's not a compelling film.
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| Anton Yelchin is the annoying pancake-mastering clairvoyant in Stephen Sommers' Odd Thomas |
Cost: 27 mil. $
Box office: In excess of 1.3 mil. $
= Box office disaster (returned 0.04 times its cost)
[Odd Thomas premiered 6 April (River Bend Film Festival, USA) and runs 93 minutes. Shooting took place around April 2011 in New Mexico. The film had a limited release in North America in February 2014 but without (presumably tiny) gross numbers released. Its 3 biggest markets were Italy (in 2015) with 579k $ (44.5 % of the known gross), Thailand with 213k $ (16.4 %) and UAE with 151k $ (11.6 %). The film reportedly made at least 3.1 mil. $ on home video sales in North America. Sommers has been unable to gather support for his next project (When Worlds Collide) following the dire flop and hasn't directed since. Yelchin returned in Star Trek Into Darkness (2013). Odd Thomas is rotten at 38 % with a 5.20/10 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]
What do you think of Odd Thomas?
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