Plot Details: This opinion reveals minor details about the movie's plot.

Director's cuts are a clever marketing tool. They make a re-release look new-and-improved. Far too often, however, they're a scam - or worse. Lucas's re-released Star Wars trilogy thankfully returned with only a few minutes of extra footage - at the most. But other films - including The Exorcist, The Blues Brothers, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Blade Runner - have been turned into bloated leftovers. The idea that "more is better" undermines the truism that "less is more."

And this time is no exception.

Donnie Darko: the Director's Cut was a response to four phenomena. The original, which flopped at the box office, had become a cult classic. Its stars, which are now on the move, were less known back then. People didn't get the ending. The director wanted to redeem himself - at least in box-office terms.

The result was a $700,000 improvement for Newmarket - which still comes as too little, too late - since they invested at least $6 million in the production. The lesson, no doubt, is to either shoot these things for less (if you're only going to distribute in 58 theaters) or get out there and push. Drugs don't even sell themselves - which is why drug dealers are called dope pushers.

THE ORIGINAL FILM (SKIP THIS IF YOU'VE READ MY OTHER REVIEW)

Released in 2001, Donnie Darko is a reaction to the world created by the massacre at Columbine High - a riproaring defense of teenage angst - before 9/11 turned us all into boy scouts and made it politically incorrect to fear only fear itself.

Donnie Darko (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a troubled teen whose bouts of depression and anger seem out of place in Middlesex County, Virginia - a verdant bit of all-American upper-middle-class suburbia. When we meet him, Donnie is waking up in odd places (because of sleepwalking episodes), fighting at the dinner table with his sister, Elizabeth (Maggie Gyllenhaal) and getting busted for not taking his meds.

Donnie, it turns out, is seeing a psychiatrist - and has been since he burned down a house, or a barn, or something. He's a kid who skulks about and calls his mother, Rose (Mary McDonnell) harsh names when she bothers to check on him. It doesn't take long to rack him up as the kind of kid who might do something bad if pushed to the edge.

On the other hand, he's a teenager - and there are plenty of reasons to look at the world through jaundiced eyes.

There are the bullies who look for fresh places to add an emotional bruise - and do it on a daily basis. There are the school administrators whose hypocrisy and narrow-mindedness are benumbing. There are the well-intentioned, but futile, attempts to slap a happy sticker onto all the joyless stuff in life. Life, as Donnie Darko sees it, is not all sunshine and roses.

And then there's the time Donnie's world was rocked when a jet engine crashed through the ceiling and demolished his bedroom. Had Donnie been "where he was supposed to be," he'd be a grease spot. Fortunately, he's a misfit - and woke up on a putting green.

But ever since the accident, things have not been the same - nor could they.

In ways that curiously predate 9/11, Donnie Darko tells the story of a high-school student whose brush with death puts him into a strange new world. Unlike the fortunate unfortunates of Final Destination, death hasn't come looking for him. It's more that Donnie has awakened, perhaps for the first time, to some of the reasons for his anger. For once, he feels like doing something about it.

Richard Kelly, who wrote and directed this film, does a better job the first time around, which focuses on the human story - without trying to turn the whole thing into a comic book. As we follow Donnie's American-Beauty-style epiphanies, we are constantly wondering whether there's something wrong with Donnie, or just something wrong with his world.

That question is made more interesting by strange, strange happenings that may be out of this world, or just proof that Donnie is out of his mind. With a growing intensity, Donnie starts seeing things, what his shrink calls "waking hallucinations." He hears voices, giving him suggestions or clues. He sees strange apparitions - like an orb or airflow that periodically flows out of his chest and snakes through the room along the path he finds himself taking. The strangest of these is Frank, who appears to him as a giant twisted rabbit - and who tells him how long he has before the world comes to an end.

Giving the main character a name like Donnie Darko is pretty heavyhanded stuff, but it's just the tip of the iceberg in a film that suggests that darkness is a part of life - and that it's crazy to suggest otherwise. Set in 1988 - just before the presidential elections that would see George W. Bush's dad clean the clock of John Kerry's boss - the debates underscore the darker side of American policy - in Panama and Nicaragua. Donnie's girlfriend, Gretchen (Jena Malone) is on the run from her father, who stabbed her mother seven times. Snake-oil salesmen like Jim Cunningham (Patrick Swayze) use the power of "positive thinking" to gloss over complex problems. Little minds like Principal Cole (David Moreland) and Kitty Farmer (Beth Grant) take hypocrisy and intolerance to new levels.

It's not clear whether Donnie's visions will turn him into a social activist - standing up to injustice - or a terrorist. Believing he's communicating with the future, Donnie borrows a book from Professor Kenneth Monitoff (Noah Wyle), a curious text on time travel written by one of the school's former science teachers - a woman known in the neighborhood as Grandma Death. In the meantime, Donnie's English teacher, Karen Pomeroy (Drew Barrymore) comes under fire when an act of vandalism is linked to elements in a short story by Graham Greene - a story she assigned for class discussion.

This version of the story is wonderfully ambiguous. It walks the line between a universe of possibilities. In so doing, it turns out some of the best satirical observations in recent memory - observations which have been buried by the post-9/11 celebration of fear and a national bunker mentality.

There are some great performances in this film. I love Jake Gillenhaal and Jena Malone - but some of the shortest performances were just as amazing. Drew Barrymore and Noah Wyle do amazing things with the briefest of roles. I never thought I'd see Patrick Swayze in this light - and boy, does he shine. Beth Grant's performance as a morality cop is hilarious, and proof that a supporting role can stretch. I was also impressed by Holmes Osborne, whose job as Donnie's father is one of the most endearing in recent memory. That man can do more with a chuckle than most actors with a half-page speech.

Unfortunately, the film's ambiguous ending set some teeth on edge. Though critically acclaimed, and quick to garner a cultlike status, the film was a box office flop to beat all contenders. Produced at a budget of $6 million, the film's theatrical release returned only $500,000. Attempts to turn it around, such as the re-release of the film as a director's cut, brought in an additional $700,000 but Newmarket was probably not prepared to see a $6 million investment come back as a $1.2 million sea of blood.

Part of that had to be a lack of marketing, ironically from a studio called Newmarket. In its widest release, Donnie Darko saw only 58 theaters - a far cry from the typical 1,000 to 2,000 of even a modest studio rollout. And given the cast - Jake and Maggie Gillenhaal, Noah Wyle, Drew Barrymore, Jena Malone, Mary McDonnell and Patrick Swayze - it's hard to imagine not getting out and really selling this film. Then again, in the wake of Columbine, maybe this film was as dead as Collateral Damage would be after September 11th.

Be that as it may, for those with a tolerance for the weird and the jarring, Donnie Darko is a cult classic that mixes so many great elements to stand on its own as a film worth seeing. That said, I'd focus more on the satire than trying to figure out the ending. Otherwise, you may find the experience a bit dizzying.

WHAT HAPPENS IN THE DIRECTOR'S CUT

By his own account, on the director's commentary, Richard Kelly - who wrote and directed this film - felt a burning desire to "clear up" the ending - or at least the logic - of the original film, which centers around a troubled high-school kid who escapes death (from a fallen jet engine) only to see his life turned inside out. As we watch him skulk about in a perennial funk, we can't quite be sure whether he's discovered a new and exciting secret to the universe - or has really forgotten to take his meds. The original is a biting satire on American suburbia, and the darkness that gets routinely denied. Those who dare speak of it are considered both crazy and worthy of punishment.

Then again, anything goes when your new best friend is a giant, twisted, rabbit named Frank.

In the director's cut, Richard Kelly claims he's "filling in the gaps" that confused so many of his viewers. I suspect, however, that revisionism is taking over. This film is really a re-envisioning of the whole project, with an attempt to emphasize different themes. Specifically, David Kelly is taken with the idea of presenting this story as a comic book.

I kid you not.

I guess one look at Spider-man - and its progeny - was enough for Kelly to do the math and decide that what we were seeing was really a comic book in disguise. To that end, he invents some bizarre, and much less interesting, explanations for the ambiguous creepiness of the first film. I'm not even sure the logic holds, but what we end up with are a series of eye-grabbing inserts, some extra elements in the soundtrack and deleted scenes re-engraffed - even when they throw off the pace.

This film repeatedly asks the question: "What if Donnie Darko's whole problem is deja-vu? What if it's all about twisted lines between parallel universes?" Kelly's idea of an answer is to give us the contents of Grandma Death's scientific treatise - The Philosophy of Time Travel. Kelly layers the pages into various scenes within the film, not always with the greatest care for the film's original continuity. The result is a hamhanded, often confusing new set of problems and questions that turn the original film into a science lesson.

If I wanted to read Stephen Hawking's book, I could do that on my own. I don't need to have it plunged into this story as if cosmological speculation were the same thing as cinematic entertainment.

Speaking of philosophy, it was Plato who - through the mouth of Socrates - suggested, in The Republic, that artists often don't know what they're talking about. They act out of a kind of instinct but are often at a loss to explain exactly what underlies their art. Who knows if that is true, but it certainly seems the case here. Kelly's reinvention of his own story is a trainwreck that suggests that, after all the input he's received from producers, directors, fans and his own inner circle - he doesn't remember what it was that made his original film work as well as it did.

That's too bad, because I sure did, and what I saw in that film was buried by the dreck I had to wade through here.

As if to add insult to injury, Kelly invited director Kevin Smith to "ride along" for the director's commentary track, perhaps to fill in the gaps. That was clearly a mistake. Kevin Smith, who is a fascinating personality in his own right, ruins the director's commentary - punching holes in Kelly's explanations, upstaging him repeatedly and going off on wild tangents that have little, if anything, to do with the film, itself - or its additions in the director's cut.

I can't convey the combined disappointment and irritation I felt at watching material onscreen, which was ignored in favor of Kevin Smith's many irrelevant asides. Somebody tell this guy to switch to decaf - or to at least shut up once in a while. Not every syllable that comes pouring out of his babbling lips is worthy of record - especially when appearing as a guest on someone else's director's commentary. Opportunity after opportunity is squandered while Kevin Smith turns the commentary track into an unscripted home movie about nothing.

Recommended: No

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good for a Rainy Day
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 9 - 12