OxfordPress.com

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

Grade: D+

Verdict: Not worth unlocking. A major disappointment from Roman Polanski.

Details: Starring Johnny Depp and Lena Olin. Directed by Roman Polanski. Rated R for violence and sexuality. 2 hours, 13 minutes.

Rate it: Write your own review

Review: Watching "The Ninth Gate" is like being force-marched through dank rooms piled high with musty books, led by drab tour guides who mutter the same pedantic points over and over. Imagine one of those seasonal Halloween horror houses, but designed by librarians. And what do you get at the end of the trek? The spectacle of a bunch of rich twits in black robes, play-acting a satanic mass.

Like the silly orgy in Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut," this late-act set piece in "Gate" confirms the sad decline of a once-terrific director.

Here it's Roman Polanski, the sly hand behind "Chinatown" and, more relevantly, "Rosemary's Baby." An expert fusion of the psychological and supernatural, that 1968 classic made us question whether the pregnant heroine was really carrying Lucifer's baby or having a mental meltdown.

No matter how weird things got, it kept a foot in the real world. By contrast, "Gate" quickly shuts out reality, starting with a New York setting that doesn't resemble New York. (Like Kubrick, Polanski shot in Europe.) And you never question the psychological state of this movie's characters: They're all nut jobs.

Johnny Depp plays Dean Corso, a sullen expert on rare books. "You're a book detective," says wealthy widow Liana Telfer (Lena Olin), one of many who're fascinated by the 17th-century volume, "The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of the Shadows." She's trying to recover her late husband's copy, acquired by reptilian publisher Boris Balkan (Frank Langella), whose personal library is devoted to one subject: the devil.

Legend holds that the book's credited author worked with a ghost writer: Satan himself. On Balkan's dime, Corso flies to Europe to inspect the two other known copies of "Gates," hoping to determine which is the original. The key is nine tarot-like engravings, which Corso finds have slight variations in each book. Supposedly, whoever unlocks the mystery of the images can summon Ol' Scratch himself and gain earth-shattering powers.

OK, fine. But Corso's journey proves long and tedious, played out in dark-paneled European offices and country homes, and sputtering to an ambiguous (unsatisfying) end. "Gate" takes place in a world without malls, computers or teenagers. Maybe this was meant to make it "timeless." Instead, it unfolds in a vacuum. You feel that Polanski himself is bored with the story and can't be bothered to liven it up. Even Corso's run-ins with a thug are lazily staged.

It would be easier to cut it some slack if a recent movie hadn't shrewdly blended reality and the paranormal. Who knows whether writer-director M. Night Shyamalan is a fan of "Rosemary's Baby," but his Oscar-nominated "The Sixth Sense" creates the same tension and understated spookiness of that film. It finds menace in the commonplace.

The problem is, there's nothing commonplace here. Like the undead revelers in Polanski's "Fearless Vampire Killers," the actors have an overitalicized look, like figures in medieval pageants. In one miscalculated scene, actor Jose Lopez Rodero plays twin booksellers. The use of split screens is clumsily apparent, the actor's dialogue is dubbed, and the characters look like dueling Gepettos.

These are among the many ill-advised choices that keep bumping you out of the movie's intended spooky spell. The only real sense of dread is on the soundtrack, via composer Wojciech Kilar's Walpurgisnacht waltz.

It doesn't help that the screenplay, adapted from Arturo Perez-Reverte's novel "El Club Dumas," credits three writers. English is a second language for two; the third is a classical literary scholar. Maybe that accounts for the leaden dialogue.

The biggest misstep is Polanski's decision to cast his wife, Emmanuelle Seigner, as The Girl. She's an enigmatic creature who shadows Corso, a guardian angel (or perhaps demon) — one of those symbolic figures that can work in books but rarely translate to the screen. Trying to seem mysterious, the blank-faced Seigner mainly seems to be fighting a hangover. Once she starts to kick butt like a ninja and (so help me) defy gravity, the film has slipped irreversibly into camp.

The biggest mystery here is how the actors maintained straight faces while mouthing the script's empty mumbo-jumbo. Depp sticks to a basic mode, simmering as a bookish, loner mercenary; the gifted Olin and Langella are stuck playing cartoons.

They probably put their faith in Polanski, trusting him to transform the lame script into a creepily elegant mood piece. Instead, it's the sort of thing that might have turned up as a 1970s TV movie, starring Anthony Franciosa and Karen Black. "The Ninth Gate" won't spook you, but it'll give you a few unintentional laughs.

— Steve Murray, Cox News Service

[an error occurred while processing this directive]