Scanners

Written and directed by David Cronenberg, Scanners follows Stephen Lack’s Cameron Vale, a young man with extraordinary telepathic powers, as he agrees to help a scientist (Patrick McGoohan’s Paul Ruth) track down a vicious sociopath with similar abilities (Michael Ironside’s Darryl Revok). There’s little doubt that Cronenberg does a superb job of immediately drawing the viewer into the narrative, as Scanners boasts an opening half hour that contains a number of impressively engrossing interludes – including a now-legendary moment involving dueling scanners and an exploding head. From there, however, Scanners moves into an awfully, palpably sluggish midsection that’s concerned with, for the most part, Cameron’s investigation and pursuit of Ironside’s sinister figure – with the less-than-engrossing nature of these sequences compounded by Lack’s hopelessly bland turn as the central character. The inclusion of several admittedly engrossing action set-pieces (eg Cameron takes down four assassins using his abilities) goes a long way towards alleviating the otherwise underwhelming atmosphere, and it’s clear that the movie does improve substantially as it approaches its balls-to-the-wall finale. And yet Scanners, for the most part, is unable to distinguish itself from other similarly-themed horror thrillers, which is a shame, ultimately, given the strength of its premise and the effectiveness of its individual scenes.

**1/2 out of ****