""The Wicker Man"" plays like a highlight reel from all the worst episodes of ""The X-Files."" It is a boring freak show, held together by the thinnest of plots, and is as suspenseful as ""March of the Penguins."" There are moments intended as sinister which, if they weren't played straight, would suggest self-parody. When the identity of the wicker man is revealed, it's an inadvertent punchline.
The opening sequence, revealed in trailers, shows Officer Edward Malus (Nicolas Cage) failing to prevent a horrific car crash. Haunted by memories of the mother and girl killed, he takes time off from the force. Weeks later, he receives a letter from his former fiancee, Willow (Kate Beaham). After leaving him, she moved to a reclusive locale in the Pacific Northwest called Summerisle. Her young daughter Rowan has gone missing, and the community members seem uninterested. She asks for Edward's help, and he obliges as a way to atone for failing the crash victims.
Edward finds a pagan community in Summerisle built on a fascistic form of feminism. Women are revered, while men perform menial labor. Sister Summerisle (Ellen Burstyn), the community leader, speaks of the ""sacred feminine""—evidence, one supposes, that director Neil Labute has read ""The Da Vinci Code."" Edward deduces that Rowan has been kidnapped in preparation for a human sacrifice; he becomes determined to return Rowan to Willow before it's too late.
Another of the movie's accidental jokes is how incompetent Edward is. He spends the film exhaustively searching for Rowan. Summerisle is about the size of a football stadium, yet he remains puzzled until the very end. And it never occurs to him to call his many police friends for backup.
There is not a single worthwhile lead performance in ""The Wicker Man."" Nicolas Cage fails to inject any sympathy into his character. The temptation is to give Cage a break, given the state of the screenplay. But the performance is lousy. When Edward screams at the sisters or defends himself, he channels a high-school actor just given his first aggressive part.
Burstyn, of ""The Exorcist"" fame, knows how to do horror, but she looks bewildered to be in a film this bad. One scene has her prancing through a forest, covered in facepaint. She looks like a reluctant charades participant. Kate Beaham is an elegant actress, but her Willow is dull enough to explain why she and Edward were once engaged.
""The Wicker Man"" also has a maddening number of unresolved shots and lines of dialogue left dangling. This is not an artistic technique; Joel Plotch's editing is completely haphazard. Labute shows a woman covered in bees, sitting in a closet in Sister Summerisle's house. Why is she there, if men are the only people persecuted in the community? Two elderly, cataract-inflicted sisters deliver all their dialogue simultaneously. Why? The dialogue is conversational and the characters could not have rehearsed it. And what is the point of Edward's continuous flashbacks to the opening car accident? For a long time, they imply a connection between Rowan and the girl killed, but this suggestion is abandoned. Perhaps there are explanations to these questions in the original 1973 cult film, but this version does not deserve the interpretive gestures.
