What is, for a solid 80 minutes or so, a pretty hair-raising and suspenseful thriller, falls apart more quickly and embarrassingly than a drunken “Real World” cast member. Forget train wrecks. Enduring the ridiculous supernatural denouement of “Hide and Seek” is akin to watching a plane crash into a train that has just steamrolled a Greyhound bus. So eager is Twentieth Century Fox to protect the “ending that everyone will be talking about,” the studio shipped the picture’s final reel separately to theaters across the country, with each reel individually numbered and accompanied by its own security detail. Fox immodestly touted these extraordinary measures — “the first time in its illustrious 70-year history” — in a widely distributed press release no doubt intended to generate unmerited hype.
Since everyone will be doing it, allow me to spend a moment talking about the ending. It’s dumb, disappointing and shamelessly derivative of a more sensible blockbuster by M. Night Shyamalan. On top of that, it negates what is up to that point an entertaining performance by Robert DeNiro as psychologist David Calloway, a grieving widower who moves his young daughter (Dakota Fanning) to a house in the remote woods of upstate New York in an effort to distance her from the memory of her mother’s gruesome death. There are several jump-outta-your-seat scares in the first two acts, in which Fanning’s Emily gets cozy with a rather nasty imaginary friend named Charlie, and David grows increasingly concerned over her bizarre behavior. Early on, director John Polson (“Swimfan”) introduces some ancillary characters such as an austere town sheriff (Dylan Baker), a lonely divorcee (Elisabeth Shue) and a potentially predatory neighbor (Robert John Burke) to amp up the whodunit factor. But the film, scripted by newcomer Ari Schlossberg, takes a big wrong turn that wipes out the solid build-up, leaving us to wonder what might have been had Schlossberg dreamed up an ending truly worth talking about. (Rated R for frightening sequences and violence. Running time: 105 minutes)
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on January 28, 2005. Read the original PDF.