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Donnie Darko Customer Reviews (31 - 33 of 213 Reviews)

"How's it feel to have a wacko for a son?"
Richard Kelly's "Donnie Darko" is a sprawling mess of a film. It tries to be profound and thought-provoking but only winds up being maddening and pointless.

High school student Donnie Darko (Jake Gyllenhaal) is having strange visions. He is taking medication and seeing a therapist but still cannot shake his problem. Is the man in the rabbit suit that he constantly sees really there or just a figment of his imagination? Is the fabric of the universe really unraveling before his very eyes? And is the world really going to end in twenty-eight days, six hours, forty-two minutes, and twelve seconds?

"Donnie Darko" strives to be intriguing but winds up just being plain weird. It appears at the outset to be a tantalizing metaphysical mystery but it ultimately reveals itself to be a tale full of nonsense and dead-ends. The only aspect of the film that comes off as being a positive is the strong acting. Gyllenhaal does a great job conveying the confusion and conviction of his character while the supporting cast of Mary McDonnell, Drew Barrymore, Noah Wyle, Patrick Swayze, and Katherine Ross all turn in yeoman work. Yet when "Donnie Darko" ends, you are left with the feeling that it should have been something much more than the spectacular failure that it is. Then again, maybe it plays better in a tangent universe.

Buy it
now im not telling you its so good you want to watch it over and over for fun but to figure out the complete story not that im sawing its a bad movie its great but kinda confusing. it all about time travle. not like back to the future time travle but diffrent. so still buy it or atleast rent it a few times.

Hamletian
Donnie Darko is a teen horror film. In addition, it's a teen romance. In addition, Donnie Darko is a Hamletian study in familial relationship. The viewer never really knows whether Donnie, a brilliant high school kid is wacko or completely sane while his adult world is nutty. I particularly liked the scenes with the lady-shrink where under hypnosis Donnie has a self-pleasuring moment. Things can go wrong in those shrink sessions for sure.

There are two groups of adults here, the Democrats and the Republicans. Dukakis is smart and thoughtful. Bush 1 is stammering and smarmy. The Physical Education teacher is new-age bunko, book burning, inflexible along with her idol, Patrick Swayze, as the handsome motivational speaker with one message, there's Fear and Love. To contrast, Drew Barrymore plays the really cool young English teacher that gets canned for being too Liberal. Donnie rebels and insists there is a world of grays out there, not black and white. Okay, this is relativism which has it's own critics. I'd go along with the evil Dan Quail idea if it were more developed, but good and evil in Darko is pretty cardboard.

I'm not at all sure why Kelly decided it was important to do a 1988 film in 2001. You got me on that one. There's as much political animosity and self-help gobblygook today as there was in the 80's. I can only assume that the 80's was a crucible for the director.

Finally, Darko is an incredibly creative film, very interesting to watch visually as things might fall out of the sky at any moment. Donnie walks through life in movie time, effortlessly burning down buildings while his girlfriend sleeps during a movie date. My teen dates were never like that.

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