What would you do if you were invisible? Apparently, scream a lot. Atleast that is what the main character Nick Powell (Justin Chatwin) chooses to do in “The Invisible.” “The Invisible” is the latest film from the creators of “The Sixth Sense,” who specialize in movies where the main character doesn’t really exist for most of the film.
“The Invisible” is the story of Nick, a golden boy in high school who finds himself mixed up with the wrong crowd, thanks to his best friend Pete (Chris Marquette). Nick is the typical angry teenager who hates his cold mother (Marcia Gay Harden) because she just doesn’t understand his deep desires to be a writer. After a party one night, Nick is beaten and left for dead by Annie Newton (Margarita Levieva), the resident school bully. Although I have mentioned the premise early on, the filmmakers take their sweet time with the exposition. It was the longest 30 minutes of my life and made the idea of watching paint dry seem appealing.
As the tag line for the film says, “How do you solve a murder when you are the victim?” Well, as it turns out, solving the murder is not the hard part. The problem is getting anyone in the mortal realm to pay attention to the embodiment of one’s soul walking the earth.
Feminists will be happy to know that women are now getting to play the villain. Still, they shouldn’t be too happy because she keeps her hat on her head so as not to reveal that she has long flowing girly hair. Levieva did the best she could to pull off the “Slip-Knot,” teen kid with an abusive family. She provided the only spark to “Invisible.”
The film was first adapted from a Swedish novel by Mats Wahl into an award-winning Swedish film “Osynlige, Den.” Then Hollywood decided that they could do it better. Not to mention Hollywood has run out of ideas and needed a break from making “Saw 20.”
“The Invisible” is a melodramatic pile of mush. The film is so overly dramatic that it makes it impossible for the audience to take it seriously. Just as parents often say to their teenager, you will find yourself saying, “Could you be anymore dramatic?” As with any film that pushes the parameters of the human imagination, the film has trouble abiding by its own rules. Although Nick cannot move a pile of books in the mortal realm, when he needs to, he suddenly receives the power.
In the end, “The Invisible” is just a bad emo love story. It will make you thankful that you graduated high school. of hormones.
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