Puke! Blood! Fire! Nazis! Rats! Creepy Scars! Hurricanes! Creepy Buildings! Bad Teeth! Madness! More puke! More blood! Murder! Mayhem! Lies! Scary scary stuff! (Did I mention, Nazis!?)

Shutter Island poses the compelling but somewhat self-absorbed question, “Is it better to live as a maker of pandering schlock horror flicks? Or die as a good director?” In posing the question the way he does, Martin Scorsese shows a degree of contempt for his audience that may well be deserved, but is not likely to be welcomed or even understood by nine out of ten of his fans.

The late winter blockbuster opens with a bluish, aging Leonardo DiCaprio puking repeatedly and copiously into a stainless steel ferryboat bathroom sink. Nobody expects Leo to be the hearthrob he was back in his Romeo and Juliet days, but because Shutter Island is a film by a major American director, and because we know that Leonardo Di Caprio is still a fabulous actor no matter how long in the tooth he might be getting in close ups, we don’t realize that he is trying to tell us something in this scene. 

It’s a warning—foreshadowing as it were—but we ignore it and go to Shutter Island with him anyway.

It’s not our fault. We trust this movie. We believe in its capacity to terrify and amaze us.

Maybe that’s why, about halfway through, things start to get a tad bit annoying, and why, about three quarters of the way through, I wanted to personally track down Martin Scorsese and bitch slap him until he coughed up (puked up?) an apology or at least gave me back my six bucks. OK, the guy is from New York. I’ve lived in New York too. I can cuss. I can lose my temper with the best of them. Does being a native New Yorker justify visual abuse as film technique? It does if you are Martin Scorsese.

Shutter Island suffers from a kind of self-indulgent laziness that only a great director is capable of achieving, and knowing his capabilities and knowing that he has done much, much better just made me all the angrier the longer this masturbatory exercise wore on. Granted, that is part of the point he is making. It doesn’t matter. Shutter Island still comes off more like punishment than art or entertainment.

For a brief moment (just before the halfway mark) the movie had me thinking that maybe Scorsese was in the process of making some large point about moral ambiguity and the dark side of the Bush administration (torture, Guantanamo, etc.) and what it has done to us all as a nation, but it quickly became apparent that nothing that grand was being offered—or, it was! But with so much insult and injury that it was hard to take. No spoonful of sugar here.

By the time water starts pouring through the grates of the M.C. Escher Memorial Sanitorium it is clear that Scorsese is throwing every Gothic Bedlam cliche he can remember onto the screen in highly saturated tones of blue, green and red. Creepy and salacious, yes. Original, no. Scared yet? How about now? How about now?

The plot, such as it is, is more of a problem than it should be. We know from the outset that DiCaprio will end up being an inmate. That’s clear from the promo clips. No Sixth Sense gotcha moments are waiting for us when it is revealed that he is patient #67. Duh. As the movie wears on, we hope against hope that there’s more to it than that. Is there? I’m not going to spoil it for you, but yes, there is more to it than that, and no, it isn’t worth waiting for. Or, it is! But it won’t make you happy, that’s all I’m going to say.

The acting is excellent, the budget is generous, the director is brilliant, and the movie is still a schlock creepfest with pretensions of artiness that are too precious by half. What especially bothered me was the gratuitous use of vivid, repetitive scenes of the liberation of Dachau, and the lurid, outdated depictions of mental illness. Neither serves any real purpose in the film save to ramp up the overall creepiness, something even a moderately skilled director should have been able to generate without resorting to offensive cliches.

Scenes become tiresome because we know what will happen before the action even gets started. We know that a body glimpsed at the bottom of a cliff isn’t what Leo thinks it is, but we still have to watch him climb down and find nothing there. It seems to take forever. We know that only one of three or four possibly true things will turn out to be really true, but we still have to sit through turgid depictions of each and every possibility. (With blood! Vomit! Fire!) A hoard of rats swarming over grey rocks seems to have nothing to do with anything whatsoever, not in this movie, or any other in recent memory. But wow, it sure is creepy!

I hoped for something to match or exceed Scorsese’s undercelebrated Bringing Out the Dead, one of the few movies ever made that stars Nicolas Cage and is also exceptionally well-made and well-acted, but alas, it was not to be. Scorsese can do moral ambiguity and hell on earth, and he can do it better than almost any other director, but he doesn’t do it in Shutter Island because he’s never fully engaged. The effects are all so cheap and facile that by the time the arty twist comes at the end, it isn’t satisfying, it’s irritating. I think he meant this to be so, I think (without spoiling it for those of you have not seen it) he meant some grand metaphor for the current Ship of State, but it’s still a giant pain in the ass to watch.

Hamlet summed it all up this way:

I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.

Yeah, bad dreams are a bitch. And so is this movie. And Scorsese?

He’s no Shakespeare. At least, not this time.