Review of Vanishing on 7th Street (2010) by A.d. O — 21 Nov 2011

It pains me to give this rating to this movie. Because visually, it's a fantastic idea. Nothing all that inventive, but a simple enough idea that, if done correctly, could have been a hell of a movie.

And visually it's just ok. Technically, the movie is well put together. But the scripting and some of the performances just bring the movie down. I like Thandie Newton and all, but there was something utterly melodramatic and over-the-top about her performance.

Hayden Christensen is the shits and while he does show signs of improvement, he just went from having the charisma of a rock, to having the charisma of a surfboard (which is just slightly more charismatic).

And John Leguizamo does nothing for me either. The kid is fine, I've seen worse...but I've definitely seen better. I think the issue is, whoever wrote this movie spent much more time working on doing scary shit with the shadows instead of spending time with the characters.

These characters are pretty one dimensional and you're never really given a reason to care for them. Like I said, technically, the movie is well put together but there's a problem with some the scenes where the shadows are mounting up.

The shadows just looked completely campy, while there were some instances of greatness, I felt most of it looked really campy and it made it hard to take the movie seriously. With a movie that's really made on its visuals, it should have been better What I did like is that they never reveal what actually happened, it didn't feel like a cheap rip off.

Plus if they went into the back-story of what happened, it probably wouldn't have been good. But they do what The Road did and that is show flashbacks before the blackout happened. Oh and also near the end, it's really hard to like the only survivor (the kid) because his stupidity caused the death of another of the main characters.

I usually don't mind characters dying. But when one character causes the death of another character and you're supposed to keep rooting for the responsible party that's where I draw the line.

Stupidity should not be rewarded. That's why the end of The Mist was so awesome, people thought it was stupid, and it was, but this character's stupidity will hunt him for the rest of his life and when you look at it from that perspective, the ending was great.

In this movie, the kid just moves on as if nothing happened and I'm supposed to be 'You survived young lad...you have earned my respect'....fuck off. Atmospherically it's a pretty good movie, but campy shadow special effects, poor script and below average acting really keep this movie from really being great.

Hell they keep it from being AVERAGE...it's just OK, at best.