Review of A Cure for Wellness (2017) by John M — 31 Aug 2017

A misfire. So this is about an ambitious company man (Dane DeHann). He gets tasked with retrieving the CEO of his company from a remote treatment and therapy spa center in the Swiss Alps, but the longer he stays there, the more the practices seem to not be on the level.

I will admit that I was actually pretty excited about this. Gore Verbinski is a talented man behind the camera, and he was making an original project with this; sure, the Lone Ranger tanked (as it should have), but that was a known property and a studio film.

When he is doing his own thing, you can get something sublime like Rango. A Cure for Wellness, on the other hand... is a giant disappointment. Now I don't know if there is some unwritten commandment written out there, but it seems to me that Dane DeHaan always has to play the same slimy, selfish character in every movie he is cast in.

I feel that he is a large reason on why this movie fails even from the beginning; you start out this movie actively disliking the protagonist, and because you aren't in charge of the narrative, you have no other choice but to spend time with him.

You are never given a reason to care about your main character, so when he finally reaches a turning point way further on the story, it is too little too late. This is a movie that is trying to be Shutter Island.

It wants to be Shutter Island so badly, that I kind of wanted to stop this and just watch that superior film instead (it doesn't help that DeHaan looks like a rejected Leo clone). It's going for creepy, and there is the occasional moment that works in this, but it becomes too repetitive to the point of all interest being lost.

The ultimate undoing for this has to be the bloated runtime. It is close to being two and a half hours long, and when a movie pushes its time limit, I typically like to think about how it would be if it were only 90 minutes long.

I feel like this ultimately has about an hour of good material at most, and I feel like it starts to spin out all too quickly, and please believe me when I tell you that it just completely loses it at the very end.

From an expectation standpoint, I do think that this is one of the biggest disappointments of the year so far. At least people are trying in this and there is occasionally a visual flair that works, but unfortunately, I have to say that if you are going to watch this, you should be prepared to be mostly bored.