Starring: Robert De Niro, Dakota Fanning, Famke Janssen, Elisabeth Shue

3 out of 10 stars

A major squandering of talent, Hide and Seek is a mind-numbingly absurd thriller that manages to make very little of its not-too-shabby cast. There's Dakota Fanning, perhaps the most prescient and intelligent child actor working today, asked to do no more than stare blankly at the camera while suffering the indignity of a bad dye job that tuns her platinum locks to a goth-black. There's the stunning Famke Janssen, who must go from the sexy-forceful heroics of Dr. Jean Grey in the X-Men movies to the standard babe-in-distress theatrics reminiscent of every cheap Hollywood thriller ever made. There's Elisabeth Shue, a one-time Academy Award nominee for Leaving Las Vegas and granted, seemingly guilty of career self-sabotage, put into low-cut country dresses and forced to act all nicey-nice towards Fanning's surly character and make goo-goo eyes at old-enough-to-be-her-dad Robert De Niro. Heck, there's even Amy Irving, who's grown to become even more strikingly beautiful as she gets older, wasted in a wan prologue and absurd flashbacks as Fanning's doomed mother.

The one person whose abilities Hide and Seek doesn't seem to waste is, sadly, Robert De Niro, who adds to his recent roster of turkeys yet another lugubrious vehicle confirming that this once-blazingly brilliant actor has fallen into a cinematic rut from which he seems unable or unwilling to pull himself out. You have to go back to about 1997 and Wag the Dog and Jackie Brown to find a decent De Niro flick, and even in those movies he took a backseat to other, more powerful performances. Since then, De Niro's been slumming all over the map in sequel-ready comedies, gloomy dramas, and now incredibly cheesy thrillers. Hide and Seek, from John Polson (the gentleman who brought you Swimfan, the teen-friendly re-imagining of Fatal Attraction), is a movie just barely on this side of stylish, but with a number of scares that are in the service of absolutely nothing. It's a jumble of pieces that never really fit together in a plausible way, and also has a plot twist – this is the kind of movie that wouldn't exist unless it had a "twist" -- that will have you kicking yourself for not figuring it out sooner, not because it's so clever but because it's so absurdly stupid.

Things start out portentously enough in Manhattan, where a happy, well-adjusted Emily (Fanning) is being tucked into bed by her all-too-sad mom (Irving, great in just a handful of scenes) – but awakens to find mom having slit her wrists in the bathtub, just moments after dad (De Niro) has discovered the body. Flash-forward a few months: Emily's a shell of a girl, psychologist dad is at a loss to help, and decides to move her upstate to the country, despite concern from his fellow psych colleague (Janssen). (If anything, this movie confirms the cinematic rule that one must never, ever move from the city to the country for fear of suffering severe bodily and mental harm.) Surly and quiet, Emily refuses to adapt to her new surroundings, until an imaginary new friend, "Charlie," helps her break the monotony. Charlie's idea of fun, however, has to do more with terrorizing various people – including comely divorcee Elizabeth (Shue) – than playing harmless games. And when Charlie goes from mental to physical torture (the family cat, from its first appearance on camera, is obviously not long for this world), dad starts fearing what his daughter is capable of – or is Charlie all too real?

Polson and his screenwriter Ari Schlossberg appear to borrow liberally from no less a movie than What Lies Beneath in terms of tossing in impossibly large red herrings that have absolutely zero to do with the plot. And when you're borrowing from one of the most derivative, albeit very fun thrillers in recent memory, it does not bode well for any original scares in your own movie (especially when the biggest jolts come from the lights suddenly going out). Scenes begin fairly intriguingly, with enough scare-me camera angles to prime you for something to happen….. but nothing usually ever does. And when it finally does, you can feel it coming from five miles away, if not sooner. Fanning is appropriately creepy at times, and holds her own with De Niro and Janssen (she actually blows Shue off the screen), but is called upon to do very little but stand around looking mopey. By the time the over-extended finale comes along, you'll be feeling less creepy and more sad, as you watch De Niro fumble through the story machinations and stumble over the gaping plot holes. It's amazing to see that he's come from playing such a preternaturally creepy psycho as Max Cady in Cape Fear to becoming a befuddled dad scrubbing down evil messages off the bathroom walls. Please, Bobby, make something good again – if only so we can remember what you're capable of!