Odd Thomas is an
adaptation of a successful novel by Dean Koontz. But the actual movie has a
breezy, quippy tone and a small-scale storyline that remind me of nothing so
much as a low-budget 80s adventure film. It’s not a great movie, or even a particularly good
movie, but it’s fun and cute and doesn’t outstay its welcome.
Most of all, it has just enough of the
secret sauce that made movies fun in the 80s to let you forgive some extreme
clunkiness and way-too-precious storytelling. Odd
Thomas is in select theaters today, and it’s been out on VOD/iTunes for a
while.
https://gizmodo.com/10-forgotten-secrets-of-great-movie-making-from-the-80s-1520715008
Spoilers ahead…
Odd Thomas is
actually written and directed by Stephen Sommers, better known as the guy who
brought you the Mummy movies, Van Helsing and the first G.I. Joe. With this film, he’s clearly
trying to do something different than a giant special effects blow-out with
larger-than-life action. He’s working with a much smaller budget, but also he’s
trying primarily to make you fall in love with the character of Odd Thomas,
with everything else in the film being secondary to that.
So why would you fall in love with Odd Thomas? Well, there’s
good news and bad news.
The good news is, Anton Yelchin, who plays Odd, is perfect
— he’s got just the right blend of “harrowed underdog,” “scared
puppy” and “lovable weirdo” to carry this character. Odd Thomas
is basically a fry cook who sees (but doesn’t hear) ghosts, and also gets
prophetic dreams and sees extradimensional harbingers of bloodshed. He’s an
all-purpose psychic who helps people.
The bad news is, this movie often seems to be trying way too
hard to make you love Odd Thomas, to the point where you get tired of being
reminded how wonderful and quirky he is. In particular, his relationship with
his ridiculously perky girlfriend Stormy probably played better on paper, but
on screen it’s ludicrously cutesy. Stormy has adorable nicknames for Odd, like
“Odd One,” or “Oddy,” and the kind of adorable banter that is
great in small doses but not so great in the kind of massive doses this movie
wants to force-feed you. If you start a drinking game where you swig every time
this movie tries to impress with you what a cute couple Odd and Stormy are,
you’ll be drunk half an hour in. Which, honestly, is probably the best way to
watch this film.
People in this film are either cute and quirky or creepy and
evil — and that’s sort of the tone this film reaches for in general.
The actual plot of Odd
Thomas is pretty simple — Odd can see the aforementioned interdimensional
harbingers of bloodshed, called Bodaks. And after an introductory sequence
where Odd helps the ghost of a murdered girl find justice, he starts seeing a
lot of Bodaks, all around the small town where he lives. The Bodaks are
gathering because some kind of terrible mass slaughter is going to happen, and
Odd has to stop it.
As part of this movie’s “trying too hard to win you
over” ethos, it packs in a lot of voice-over, and explains the mythos in extreme
detail. Long after you think the “introductory voiceover” part of the
film is over, the voiceover comes back and explains stuff again. (One wonders
if this was something that resulted from a test screening where a few people in
the back row got lost halfway through.) There’s probably an equation that
explains the steep curve, where a few minutes of voiceover can make your film
smarter, but after that every additional minute of voiceover makes it seem
dumber and dumber. Certainly, after a while, a voiceover stops conveying
information and starts conveying “We don’t trust you to understand
anything.”
So before I get carried away complaining about this movie,
let’s get back to how it’s kind of fun and entertaining. It’s a small-town
adventure in which the stakes are kept purposely low, and (until the somewhat
dark ending) it’s a feel-good movie about horrific creatures and terrible
crimes — which is what reminds me of a low-budget 80s movie. Odd Thomas is a
fun underdog, and he seems agreeably out of his depth most of the time as he
tries to figure out what’s going on in time to stop a major atrocity.
Also — spoiler alert — Odd
Thomas is the rare example of a story where the hero is pretty much the
only parnormal element. The people Odd Thomas is coping with are not at all
supernatural, and neither are the problems he solves. It’s interesting to see
someone using mystical powers to cope with entirely non-mystical threats and
problems — sort of like Asterix,
in a way.
https://gizmodo.com/asterix-the-great-unsung-fantasy-hero-5966002
If anything, Odd
Thomas is more of an unconventional detective story than a fantasy story —
and a lot of the kinks in the story come from Odd’s tricky but mostly cozy
relationship with the police chief, played by Willem Dafoe. Because the Chief
is one of the good guys in this story, he’s kind of quirky and zany, but Dafoe
keeps him somewhat grounded, and some of the most interesting bits in the story
involve the cops finding sneaky ways to justify the evidence that Odd uncovers
with his psychic powers.
The stuff I liked about Odd
Thomas — its underdog hero, its low stakes, its feelgood horror —
reminded me somewhat of the Fright Night remake
that came out in 2011 and also starred Anton Yelchin. That said, if you haven’t
seen the Fright Night remake yet, you
should definitely watch that instead of Odd
Thomas, since it’s a vastly more watchable film.
Odd Thomas remains
sort of alternately breezy and creepy, right up until a dark ending that’s
affecting even though it’s telegraphed from a long way off. The main thing I
came away from this movie feeling was that Anton Yelchin really deserves to
star in a hit movie franchise (aside from Star
Trek, I mean) because he’s so good at playing these sorts of characters.
Oh, and Jon M. Chu ought to be required by law to make a sequel to every
Stephen Sommers movie — if the director of G.I.
Joe: Retaliation and Legion of
Extraordinary Dancers made a followup to this Odd Thomas film, I bet he’d drill a lot deeper into the hero’s
vast amounts of joyful anguish, that are barely touched on in a film that tries a bit too hard to
be charming.
