If Dragonfly wants to show us what life after death is like, then it succeeds.

I died of agony watching this sludgepile of a film.

~Agony over the fact that a writer (David Seltzer) hunched over a keyboard for months (or, as it more likely appears, days) typing a script that combines New Age spiritualism with etymology.

~Agony over the fact that a half-talented director (Tom Shadyac, Patch Adams, Ace Ventura) and producers (eight of them!) would get a mutual gleam in their eyes at the thought of casting Kevin “Film Flop” Costner in what would surely be the biggest “thriller” since The Sixth Sense.

~Agony over the fact that at least two very talented actors (Joe Morton and Ron Rifkin) are wasted while one wasted-talented actor (Kevin Costner) is given about 98 more minutes of screen time than he deserves.

~Agony over the fact that a studio (Universal) would budget $60 million for a motion picture that looks like it couldn’t have cost more than the price of your average open-heart surgery, even if the patient (the viewer) died on the operating table.

According to the religion preached by Dragonfly, we mostly-dead viewers are supposed to see rainbows, bright lights and dry-fog landscapes as we float toward the Other Side. All I saw during the movie was the dopey moping of Costner, playing a doctor whose wife (also a doctor) is involved in a terrible accident while on a humanitarian medical mission to Venezuela. A landslide sweeps her and a busload of Third World kids into a river. The bodies are never recovered and Costner goes through the five stages of grief (though in his hands, it turns out to be something like two-and-a-half stages).

He throws himself into his work as head of emergency services at Chicago Memorial Hospital. The phrase “working twenty-four-seven” pops up in the script at least three times. Nevertheless, there are plenty of scenes outside that twenty-four-seven schedule where Costner mopes around the house, packing his wife’s clothes into cardboard boxes, conversing with her beloved pet parrot (who, like a grief-stricken child, refuses to speak since news of her death), and building a mobile of dragonflies to hang over the crib of the unborn child she was carrying at the time of the accident. For reasons never fully explained, she loved dragonflies. I suppose the filmmakers want us to believe the big-winged bugs have some deep spiritual significance; but my guess is, they just think it would be totally cool to have a flock of the insects appear outside Costner’s window one night and, in a crescendo of creepy music, come crashing through the glass. (Curiously, this particular scene was in the movie’s previews, but not the final cut. You can now see it on the DVD’s deleted scenes feature).

As the soundtrack gets continually more ominous (and obvious), Costner starts hearing his wife speak through brain-dead patients in the hospital. “Joe!” they hiss through their life-support ventilators, “Joe, can you hear me?”

This is Costner’s cue to get bug-eyed (no pun intended) and start thrashing about the hospital, causing his boss (Morton) to say, “You need to take some time off.”

If I was a box-office doctor, I’d be saying the same thing to Costner. He’s an actor who proves there is death after life in the movies. He’s one of the few people I know who degrades, rather than improves, his craft with every movie he makes. I have to go as far back as Field of Dreams (thirteen years and sixteen movies ago) to find a performance where I was convinced Costner actually believed in the dialogue coming from his mouth. Since then, it has been little more than self-conscious line-readings bloating the screen.

In Dragonfly, his voice quivers with melancholy grief, but it comes across as a superficial acting trick. He delivers big speeches about the saintliness of his dear departed wife, but I don’t believe a syllable that comes from his lips. I’ve seen more honesty displayed by plaid-jacketed salesmen down at the used car lot.

Over the years, there have been a few decent movies associated with his name (A Perfect World and Thirteen Days to name a couple), but they have succeeded on merits which had nothing to do with Costner. I am constantly amazed that he continues to get such high-profile work in Hollywood after clunkers like Waterworld, The Postman, The Bodyguard and so on ad nauseam—essentially, elbowing aside other actors who could have done so much with his roles.

As proof of how miscast Costner can be, imagine what kind of movie Dragonfly could have been if either Morton or Rifkin were put in the lead. It would still be hard to cut through the lame idiocy of the plot (which only gets stupider as it moves toward a silly “twist ending”), but at least the mere fact we could watch Morton or Rifkin on screen would have relieved some of the cranial pressure of the thudding headache that we know as Kevin Costner.

In Dragonfly, his character desperately needs to find closure for his mourning. I’d say we viewers also need closure—a swift end to Costner’s career in the movies.


Recommended: No