Rarely does a decent film sabotage itself at the climax as badly as ‘Dream House’ does.  What starts out as a decent enough psychological thriller with an A-list cast and production team winds up devolving into the kind of trash that struggles to even go direct to DVD.  Director Jim Sheridan and Cinematographer Caleb Deschanel make the film look spooky and effective, but writer David Loucka does such an awful job with the latter portion of his script, that it absolutely destroys any of the goodwill the first part of the movie establishes.  When a movie stars has that talent behind the camera and people like Daniel Craig, Rachel Weisz, and Naomi Watts in the cast, you’d assume that someone had read the script.  Either they didn’t, or the studio tampered with this in a major way, since the end result is pretty crummy.  I literally had far less of a problem with this flick until about the last 20 minutes or so, which are among the worst of anything I’ve seen this year.  The summation of a decent majority and an awful minority end up making this a sure fire must miss for most.  I can’t imagine anyone leaving this film feeling like they got what they wanted out of it.

I would imagine that the film works a lot better without knowing the spolier-fillled details of the trailer, so I’m going to exclude that element from my plot synopsis in case anyone is still interested in seeing this.  The story centers around Will Atenton (Craig), who moves from the big city to the country so he can spend more time with his wife (Weisz), children (Claire and Taylor Geare), and work on a novel.  They planning on fixing up their new place and making, yes…a “dream house”.  As you’d expect, spooky stuff begins to occur, unsettling the family.  They also learn that the previous owner of the house killed his entire family.  A neighbor next door (Watts) doesn’t provide all of the answers Will is looking for, so he begins to dig deeper himself, and what he unearths will cause him to question everything that he knows to be true.  The plot is fairly old fashioned, but up until the climax it’s mostly effective.

The acting is sufficient for the material, but no one here is doing particularly memorable work.  Daniel Craig is the only one who gets a character with anything to them.  He’s effective in the role, but it’s not necessarily something that caused him too much trouble.  Like his co-stars Rachel Weisz and Naomi Watts, he could do this sort of thing in his sleep.  Weisz and Watts are more in the background than Craig, but the three of them are obviously the focus of the film.  The co-stars include Elias Koteas, Martin Csokas, Jane Alexander, Rachel G. Fox, and the aforementioned Geares.  There’s no one who leaves a real impression, but no one makes a fool of themselves…the climax does that for them.

For director Jim Sheridan, it’s a different sort of film than what we’re used to from him, but he shows an aptitude for atmosphere and tension.  If Sheridan could have had a better screenplay, this might have been a very effective movie.  It looks very nice, but when the ending kicks into gear, all that goes away.  The scribe here, as previously mentioned, is David Loucka, someone not known for particularly good movies (though I have a soft spot for his “Whoopi Goldberg coaches the Knicks” basketball flick ‘Eddie’ in my heart).  Surprisingly, he does a fair enough job until the final 20 minutes or so, where he sets everything on fire and enrages the audience.  It literally feels like you’ve switched over to a whole different movie.  It’s terrible, and frankly unforgivable for something that was not a bad film until then.  I often can forgive a good film for having a bad ending, just like a mediocre film with a good ending can be elevated, but here…a decent film with an atrocious ending just makes me shake my head and sigh.

‘Dream House’ is ruined by its final minutes, but until then it has some things to like.  I can’t even come close to recommending it to you, but if you deem it necessary to see, it’s not the worst thing in theaters.  The ending may be, but the whole of it isn’t.  If this sort of thing turns you on, go for it and maybe use the bathroom as the minutes tick down to the end.  Whatever you make up in your head will surely be better than what this flick came up with…

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