Category: robert de niro (Page 3 of 3)

A strong cast and a nifty begining quickly unravel into incoherence.

“Red Lights” presents a strong cast with a promising premise and early on feels like it will rise into something memorable.  But before it’s done, the film dissolves into gibberish and hysteria, snuffing out hope like a cigarette beneath the sole of a boot and memorable mostly as a botch.

Sigourney Weaver and Cillian Murphy play a pair of scientists who specialize in debunking claims of paranormal phenomena.  The stakes of their work are academic until the news that Simon Silver (Robert De Niro), a renowned blind psychic, is returning to the limelight after decades in seclusion.  He has a history with the investigators, and they’re determined to reveal him as a fraud.

It starts well, with Weaver snappy and sassy, Murphy charmingly skittish, and De Niro understated and creepy.  But given how badly the script and tenor of the film get away from writer-director Rodrigo Cortés (who previously made the underrated “Buried”), you’d think that ‘fraud’ would be the last thing the fellow would want you to think about.  By the time the film reaches its convoluted, bombastic and preposterous climax, any sense of real magic that it once conveyed has utterly vanished.
    
(113 min., R, Fox Tower) Grade: C-minus