What began as a half-decent portrayal of upper-middle class white America, soon spiraled into a schmaltzy extravaganza of total blasphemy in ""The Invisible."" This is one of those pseudo-thrillers that indulges so shamelessly in its characters that anybody who has ever seen a movie in their lifetime can literally feel the script as it struggles to produce sensitivity and depth.
The mythos of ""The Invisible"" is the only half-interesting thing to look at, but instead of emphasizing the sweet science fiction aspect of the story, writers Mick Davis and Christine Roum suffocate everything in their script's crass desperation for tenable characters. In the mean time, it seems like director David S. Goyer really wants to make good talent look bad in leading man Justin Chatwin. More yelling, more tantrums, more sniveling complaints of upper-middle class white kid oppression, please. Even the materialistic teenagers in the audience are thinking, who cares?
Chatwin plays Nick Powell, a high school senior who has had a less than satisfying relationship with his mother (Marcia Gay Harden) since the death of his father five years ago. The first scene is mesmerizing and beautifully done—promising in ways that the bulk of the movie never fulfills. This scene could, ultimately, be the most disappointing part of ""The Invisible."" It shows audiences that this movie had a fighting chance, but shortly after Nick's near-death, all of that focus shatters into a thousand fragments of chaos.
The film's only dynamic character is hard-knock Annie (Margarita Levieva) who boosts cell phones illegally for cash. Her home life isn't completely terrifying, but she deals with a neglectful stepmother and absent father. After Annie robs a jewelry store, she has a fight with her bad-boy, car mechanic boyfriend Marcus (Alex O'Loughlin), and somebody rats her out to the cops. After learning Nick was the unlucky snitch (which is incorrect; it was Marcus who told the cops), she almost beats him to death in a forest somewhere, and when she and her posse assume he's dead, they dump him in the sewer.
After that, Nick finds himself walking around, invisible to our world and part of some sort of netherworld that living things enter when their bodies are in a state of near-death. This part is neat, but the approach is all wrong.
Nick can't talk to anybody. He can't get anybody's attention. He can't leave notes or clues. All he knows is that the detectives and search parties better find him soon, otherwise he'll die. Now, this has the potential to be interesting if only Nick would have something productive to do while the detectives and search parties are investigating. Instead, he just demonstrates over and over and over and over that he can't get anybody's attention. And he watches. And observes. And eggs people on. Sometimes, dogs can see him. At some point, Annie can hear him. At the end, he possesses his own pseudo-killer so he can talk to his mom.
But at no point is any of this explained even a little bit. The idea that ""The Invisible"" is some sort of supernatural thriller is laughable. This isn't a supernatural thriller. It's a mawkish character drama with a comatose main character. How much can really happen in a movie like this? Not much. And that's exactly what does happen. Nothing.
