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The Invisible

Should've Stayed Invisible
1 of 5 stars

Should've Stayed Invisible

Written on 17/10/07 by

Plot Outline

Two young teens' real selves are invisible to others, one due to his untimely death and the other due to the neglect she's endured since the death of her mother.

Review Summary

This movie is terrible.

The Review


Every time I watch a movie to review, I sit down with a pen and notepad to write down any thoughts that I may have had that would benefit said review. Upon looking at my two pages of scribble that I recorded for The Invisible, there's something interesting that I noticed. This movie is terrible.

Nick is an average high school student who's mom “just doesn't get it.” Seriously. That was a line from the movie. Anyway, he is a poet who wishes to attend a writing workshop in London to hone his writing skills. The problem is that his mother forbids it. “Where's his dad,” you ask? He died when Nick was 13. That's why he's so deep. Regardless of his mother's wishes, he books that flight to London which he paid for with the money he accumulated from selling term papers to students.

Annie is the resident high school bully equipped with everything from an all black wardrobe to Slipknot posters and stickers. She lives in a crummy apartment with her step-mom who never cooks, an abusive father, and her younger brother. “Where's her mom,” you ask? She died when Annie was young. Ahhhh, the convoluted plot thickens.

When Annie's criminal boyfriend secretly turns her in for stealing diamond jewelry because she is getting “out of control,” she needs to teach whoever did it a lesson. She suspects Nick's best friend, Matt, because he owes her money and she won't stop torturing him until she gets it. Out of fear, he lies and tells Annie that Nick did it because he knows that Nick will be long gone before they even start looking for him. There's just one thing: for a reason still unclear to me, Nick decides not to go to London. While teaching Nick a lesson, Annie accidentally kills him. All while Matt looks on. They decide to stash his body in the woods.

I won't go any further into the plot because it just gets unnecessarily more complicated. All you need to know is that Nick finds out from a bird that he is not dead, and he needs someone to find his body before he actually dies. Apparently, when you're unconscious, your spirit walks the Earth. He implores the help of Annie, the very girl who put him in this situation, and the very girl he ends up actually liking because they have so much in common, because she somehow hears him.

In an age of teeny-bopper horror films, this one stands out as one of the teeniest. It's got everything: bad writing, bad dialogue, bad acting, characters who emote nothing, plot holes you couldn't help but hide a body in, unclear motives (including why Matt never goes to the police himself, considering he did nothing wrong), unresolved plots, slow motion, and emo music (including Deathcab for Cutie's I Will Follow You Into the Dark).

This review is already long enough, so I'll end it here. All I can suggest to you is to avoid this movie like the plague. To steal Donny's trademark ending: This is a killer film... but only in the sense that it actually made me want to kill myself.

The Invisible (2007)

Directed By

David S. Goyer

Starring

Justin Chatwin, Margarita Levieva, Marcia Gay Harden

Opening Date

Fri, Apr 27th 2007

DVD date

Tue, Oct 16th 2007