Main cast: James Badge Dale (James Lasombra), Marin Ireland (Nora Quail), Stephen Root (Arthur Parsons), Ron Canada (Detective Villiers), Robert Aramayo (Garrett), Joel Courtney (Brandon Maibum), Sasha Frolova (Amanda Quail), Samantha Logan (Davara Walsh), Aaron Poole (Paul), Adam Ferguson (Tulpa), Owen Teague (Duncan West), Evan Jonigkeit (Greg), and Tanya van Graan (Allison Lasombra)
Director: David Prior
Yes, I’m late to the party and I only finally watch The Empty Man, a movie said to be a cult classic despite receiving scathing reviews at the time of its theatrical debut. Well, I keep an open mind about movies that didn’t receive critical acclaim upon their debut, because if I do, I’d miss out on fabulous films like John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing. Unfortunately, this one turns out to be more hype than substance.
Basically, we have ex-cop turned security store staff James Lasombra looking for his neighbor Nora Quail’s missing daughter Amanda. What seems like a possible case of a young lady packing her bags to move out without telling her mother soon devolves into something darker, involving a doomsday cult that is trying to bring a being called The Empty Man into the world. I’m not sure how a cult dedicated to a being called The Empty Man can ever be taken seriously, but hey, who knows what people are into these days.
Technically, this movie falls into the horror genre, but it’s closer to being a supernatural thriller. There are no genuine scares here, just cheap jump scares, and the monster here is some guy in an all-black costume running after our protagonist while loud clashing music plays in the background. The bulk of the movie is made up of slow, slow, slow scenes of people taking their time to walk down hallways or staring pensively ahead as if I’d nothing better to do than to look at these people and go, “Gee, these people are scowling at the camera for five minutes… that’s so deep!” Yes, this movie clocks in at over two hours and the whole thing dragging on its feet for so long is largely responsible for that.
Indeed, pacing is a serious issue with this movie. I’m not going to go into the various twists and turns taken by the plot here, so let me just say instead that there are way too many things happening here, but because the movie spends so much of its running time just having James walking or running around hallways and passageways without any pay-off, everything feels rushed and underdeveloped in the end. The worst mistake committed by this movie is having a twenty-minute prologue that, in hindsight, adds nothing to the overall plot—the “the Empty Man will get you in three days” concept introduced in the prologue is hammered heavily later in the movie, and what happens in this prologue can easily be summarized later in the movie. The people behind this movie is very good at wasting everyone’s time, let’s just say.
This is not a good thing because, in the end, The Empty Man is a mystery box movie. It is far more interested in introducing twists and turns than actually telling a coherent story, perhaps hoping that people will not change the channel so long as it keeps dangling mysteries in front of the audience like a fat juicy carrot. The problem is, after watching this thing twice to get a complete picture, I find that the picture is a dull, done-many-times-before one with still many questions left unanswered. The sad thing is, I’m not even enthused to find the answers to these questions because I have sat through over four hours of this movie to get an anticlimactic revelation.
This movie doesn’t respect my time or intelligence, for it thinks I am in love with it as much as it is with itself. Given how often the movie zooms in on James Badge Dale’s face for no reason other than these people believe that doing so makes the movie come off as smarter than it is, it’s probably a good thing that the actor has lovely strong jawline and gorgeous eyes. Otherwise, this film would be an even more tedious slough to endure.
