Dead Silence

Although director James Wan does a nice job of infusing Dead Silence with an expectedly stylish sensibility, the film is ultimately nowhere nearly as compelling as his breakthrough debut (2004’s Saw) – a vibe that can be attributed primarily to the lackluster storyline and star Ryan Kwanten’s decidedly uncharismatic performance. The plot – which follows Kwanten’s Jamie Ashen as he returns to his hometown to bury his wife and is subsequently confronted with a decades-old mystery involving a murdered ventriloquist – has been suffused with a number of distinctly uninteresting elements, and it becomes increasingly impossible to actually care about Jamie’s efforts to get to the bottom of things (ie the character spends an egregious amount of time just wandering around the spooky little town). This is despite the inclusion of several genuinely creepy moments, with the Screamesque opening certainly the most obvious example of this. But Kwanten is simply unable to transform Jamie into a compelling figure; it’s instead Donnie Wahlberg’s turn as Jim Lipton that proves to be the only consistently bright spot within the movie, and the actor deftly steals each of his scarce scenes as a persistent (and utterly quirky) detective. Wan’s efforts to duplicate Saw‘s mind-bending conclusion feels like a derivative, desperate move, and there’s simply no pegging Dead Silence as anything other than an ambitious misfire.

** out of ****

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