After “Gangs of New York,” “The Aviator” and “The Departed,” we’re all in agreement that Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio make excellent movies together, right?
The two men team up together again for “Shutter Island,” and it’s this collaboration alone that makes me at all interested in a movie that looks like it will scare the heck out of me.
I’ve never been a huge fan of scary movies, with a few key exceptions (such as “Silence of the Lambs,” which still manages to enthrall and horrify me).
In “Shutter Island,” DiCaprio is a U.S. Marshall (utilizing the same lowbrow Boston accent he had in “The Departed”), who with his partner (Ruffalo) is investigating the disappearance of a patient at the dilapidated Shutter Island mental hospital in the 1950s. The missing woman appears to have completely vanished, and as their investigation digs deeper into the bizarre world of Shutter Island, horrible things begin to happen and it begins to look unlikely that they’ll ever be permitted to leave the island.
On the surface, it seems like run of the mill stuff: Man goes to “haunted” asylum, man goes crazy, man becomes prisoner himself. But I’m willing to give Scorsese the benefit of the doubt, as I’m sure he has something much more than that in store for us.
Plus, I have a strange sort of fascination with the mental hospitals of years gone by; they were inhumane, sadistic, torturous, and scariest of all, completely real. The sort of horrors that those who were deemed “insane” used to go through trump any supernatural or otherworldly thriller you can name, and in the hands of DiCaprio and Scorsese, I’m intrigued to see what “Shutter Island” has to offer.
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This is why stars get paid what they do. Without Scorsese and DiCaprio, this would look like a run-of-the-mill movie, but their involvement raises the level of the whole thing.
Good flick.