Like other posters, I've long regarded the Mary Worth legend as worthy of the cinema. But like it's predecessors, this movie can't cut it. Poor acting, poor CGI, incomprehensible screenplay, lousy camera work that tries so hard to be "artsy", but comes off as annoying.
The plot jumps around so often from past to present that it really gets confusing. At least the 1600's scenes are recognizable as such, but the "modern" plot line is very hard to follow -- there's two subplots playing almost simultaneously: the "present day" scenes of the "hero", then scenes of the Mary Worth game that started all the unpleasantness several years earlier. The director volleys us back and forth faster than a tennis game. And the worst of it is that we get no real set-up of these characters; new people keep popping up without any explanation of who they are, and frankly, the actresses in both subplots are so uniformly forgettable that one can't help but get them mixed up!
Then there are a couple strange musical interludes played over montages, which deflate any tension faster than the air going out of a tire. Was this a homage to cheap Seventies message films? We're treated to an excruciatingly dull scene in a café between the hero and the priest where they sit there staring at each other for five minutes, barely saying a word. Oh, and then we get some boring scenes of the priest driving around in his car. ZZZZZZZZZZ
After all this muck, the climax of the film turns out to be very pedestrian, indeed. Mary Worth gets banished fairly easily for a spirit who's been making trouble for 300 years. But is she banished? Apparently not, because the director couldn't resist the usual "shocker" ending we've all come to expect in such schlock. Ho hum.
Guess we moviegoers will have to wait a while longer to get a decent treatment of the Mary Worth legend.
The plot jumps around so often from past to present that it really gets confusing. At least the 1600's scenes are recognizable as such, but the "modern" plot line is very hard to follow -- there's two subplots playing almost simultaneously: the "present day" scenes of the "hero", then scenes of the Mary Worth game that started all the unpleasantness several years earlier. The director volleys us back and forth faster than a tennis game. And the worst of it is that we get no real set-up of these characters; new people keep popping up without any explanation of who they are, and frankly, the actresses in both subplots are so uniformly forgettable that one can't help but get them mixed up!
Then there are a couple strange musical interludes played over montages, which deflate any tension faster than the air going out of a tire. Was this a homage to cheap Seventies message films? We're treated to an excruciatingly dull scene in a café between the hero and the priest where they sit there staring at each other for five minutes, barely saying a word. Oh, and then we get some boring scenes of the priest driving around in his car. ZZZZZZZZZZ
After all this muck, the climax of the film turns out to be very pedestrian, indeed. Mary Worth gets banished fairly easily for a spirit who's been making trouble for 300 years. But is she banished? Apparently not, because the director couldn't resist the usual "shocker" ending we've all come to expect in such schlock. Ho hum.
Guess we moviegoers will have to wait a while longer to get a decent treatment of the Mary Worth legend.