The Passage

THE PASSAGE (2007) - Sept. 12, 2007
This started out quite badly, and I was pretty much ready to write it off as a complete waste of time, but somewhere around the midpoint the thrillerish elements started kicking in, and it actually did improve quite a bit. It was never all that great, but by the end it was downright watchable, which is much more than I can say for the first half. The film is about an American, traveling through Morocco with his British friend (or his "mate" as he keeps awkwardly calling him, which just sounds wrong when it's coming from Stephen Dorff), who meets an intriguing Moroccan girl who invites him to see the sights with her. Eventually they end up in a dark, labyrinthine series of tunnels, in which he only has a few candles with which to see, and then only the flash from his camera. This whole sequence was actually quite well done, and pretty suspenseful. The problem is everything that precedes it, which is really slow and pretty much not interesting at all. Much of this can be attributed to Stephen Dorff's remarkably wooden performance. He's the focus of the movie, but he doesn't have even a fraction of the charisma required to pull a role like this off. He's like some kind of charisma black hole. He has zero chemistry with the Moroccan woman, which makes all their scenes together a complete wash (which is pretty much the entire first half of the film). Plus, I thought the twist at the end of Shadows was obvious, but if there's anyone who is actually surprised by the twist at the end of this movie, I'd have to seriously question their intelligence. **1/2