Andrew Kantor's Place: Giving Away the Plot

Giving Away the Plot

Published 11/26/03

Why is it that movie reviewers find it necessary to give away large portions of the plot in their reviews. It’s an awful trend, and one that has me skipping them for fear of ruining a movie I want to see.

The 1996 Mel Gibson/Gary Sinise movie Ransom is a great example. (And an old one, so I can avoid spoilers here.)

Knowing I wanted to see it, I avoided watching trailers or reading reviews. So I was gratified to be the only person in the theatre to be surprised when Sinise’s character (a cop) turns out to be the bad guy.

Obviously the director wanted it to be a surprise — it’s carefully hidden until the Big Revelation. Unfortunately, thanks to the likes or Roger Ebert, there was no big revelation for most folks.

See, in his review of Ransom, Ebert wrote:

The movie makes little mystery about the identity of the kidnappers; we need to know who they are in order to appreciate the cat-and-mouse game that takes place. The gang is masterminded by Gary Sinise, a crooked police detective, and includes his girlfriend (Lili Taylor), who once worked for Gibson and knows the family’s routine.

Ebert is dead wrong. He assumes that because the kidnappers’ identities aren’t hidden until the last five minutes, “the movie makes little mystery” about them. And so he helped cheat a lot of people out of a nifty surprise.

That’s just giving away one big plot point. Ebert, like many reviewers, often feel the need to give away huge chunks of it.

Warning: Spoilers for Gothika ahead!

In his review of Gothika, Ebert gives us this:

On the obligatory dark and stormy night, Miranda takes a detour and swerves to avoid a ghostly, ghastly girl standing in the middle of the road, who bursts into flames. When she wakes up, she’s a prisoner in her own institution and Pete breaks the news to her: She’s accused of the brutal murder of her husband. How can this be? She tries to remember, but there’s a blank. Chloe (Penelope Cruz), a former patient, now a fellow inmate, explains the rules: Now that Miranda is officially insane, it doesn’t matter what she says, since it will be dismissed as her illness talking.

Heck, there’s no reason to watch the first half hour! Now when (if) you go to see Gothika, you know what’s going to happen when Miranda takes the detour, you know where she’s going to wake up, you know she’s been accused of murder…

That’s bad reviewing. It’s the mark of a writer of limited creativity, who has to resort to rattling off the plot in order to give us an opinion of the flick.

In today’s Columbus Dispatch we have a review of Timeline.

Warning: Spoilers for Timeline ahead!

Reviewer Barbara Zuck gives us this:

A search party led by ex-Marine Frank Gordon (Neal McDonough) is transported and, within minutes, two of the party are dead and both Assistant Professor Andre Marek (Gerard Butler) and students Chris (Paul Walker) and Kate (Frances O�Connor) are engaged in hand-to-hand combat.

The shy and fearful Francois (Rossif Sutherland, younger brother of Kiefer) suddenly loses his life. Marek loses his heart to a fair lady (Anna Friel).

Well then. Thanks for ruining all those potential surprises.

It’s not just the reviewers. Plenty of people have already complained about trailers — how they tend to be three-minute versions of the film that leave very little plot to the imagination. (Yesterday I saw a trailer for Denzel Washington’s upcoming Man on Fire. Now I don’t need to see anything but the last 15 minutes.)

Maybe reviewers think it’s all about the acting or the effects — that plot is just a thin thing holding it together. For some movies that may be true. But for most it’s the plot that’s fun, it’s the plot that holds surprises. Good reviewers don’t have to tell us “he watches so-and-so get killed” or “such-and-such turns out to be…” Good writers can give vague hints while still discussing the ups and downs. They can tell us whether it works or not without pulling back the curtain.

I just wish they would.