Ever wonder what it would've been like if slack-jawed Billy Bob Thornton (Sling Blade) had written
What Lies Beneath? And what if Sam Raimi (
The Evil Dead and A Simple Plan) had directed it? Well, if these possibilities gnaw at your lower intestine, then your twisted little prayers have been answered here with The Gift. For a cast we get award winning Cate Blanchett (Elizabeth), Keanu Reeves (Speed and
The Matrix) STILL trying to be a bad guy after his unsuccessful bid with The Watcher, as well as a personal fave Giovanni Ribisi (SubUrbia and The Mod Squad), ulta-fuckable though ultra-annoying Katie Holmes (Disturbing Behavior), as well as Greg Kinnear (*snicker* Mystery Men and Blankman) and Hillary Swank (The Next Karate Kid and Boys Don’t Cry), who's really, errr, "Swanky"!... what do you expect after 72 hours of no sleep and a diet of nothing but caffeine pills?! Damn suicide rate. If it doesn't stop spiking upward, I'm gonna have to hire an assistant! Stupid teens and their "problems". Stupid old people and their "degenerative diseases". Why can't they just do what my 'Nam vet high school gym teacher used to tell us and just "walk it off"?! I got shot in the face by a pimp and you didn't hear me bitching and moaning about how bad I wanted to die.
Pimp anecdotes aside, let's unwrap this little “gift”. Annie (Blanchett) is a widow. Her husband died a year prior to our story in a factory explosion of some kind. That's what happens when you work at the fireworks warehouse... Anyway, when her hubby passed on (in a rage of fire and flying limbs) Annie was left alone to raise their three sons, whose names aren't important. There's a little something extra to Annie, and no, I don't mean she's packing a hot dog revolver in her panties, I mean she has psychic powers. She uses her sixth sense to read tarot cards for her neighbors, using it as a supplemental income to her social security from her husband's "accident". Despite the 700 Miss Cleo commercials we all see daily, don't think that that's how Annie lives. She don't use those fancy cards with the 5th grader drawings of knights and court jesters with 4 legs, Annie can't afford those. Instead she uses the 99-cent store variety, you know, the ones that look like flash cards. Everything's going fine in Annie's life, well, as good as the life of a flash card flinging single mother of three can be, when her fortune telling and Ann Landers advice gets her in trouble. One of Annie's regular customers, a battered wife named Valerie (Skank... err, Swank), has been caught going to Annie's voodoo playing card sessions by her stereotypical violent redneck husband Cleatus... I mean, Donnie (Reeves). "Most folk'll never lose a toe, but then again some folk'll, like Donnie, the slack-jawed yokal!"... sorry, immersed myself in a one man "Simpsons" marathon all last weekend. Still feeling some of the after effects. Oh well, I'm sure my 3-day lesbian porn marathon this weekend will straighten me out... in more ways than one ladies, heh heh! *Insert Evil Grin Here*
Yeah, like I was saying, Donnie finds out that Annie's been filling Valerie's head with "satanic" mumbo-jumbo. And he's not too pleased, since he's been trying to fill her head with good Christian values, like bruises and welts and internal cerebral hemorrhaging. So, Donnie pays a little visit to Annie's home to set her straight on his "if'n I wants mah wife tuh be uh punchin' bag, that's mah business and ah reckon yuh should keep yer hooked witch nose outta it" policy. If Val doesn't stop coming over for readings, Annie's gonna pay for it when Donnie puts her at the business end of a voodoo doll... HAHAHAHAH! That's priceless. Not "autographed De Vinci sketch of the Mona Lisa" priceless, but "the president nearly got booted out of office because a fat ugly woman deep throated him" priceless! Only this priceless moment won't be shown non-stop on CNN until EVERY comedy show in the country has beaten it like Rodney King at the Los Angeles Policeman's Ball. I wanna break into a rousing round of AC/DC's song about having big balls, but I already did the slack-jawed Donnie theme song, so I'll just continue with the review. However, since he's such a big redneck and voodoo is likely outside his boundaries of backwoods comprehension, Donnie instead mentions that he wouldn't want Annie's kids to wind up alone without their momma. Aw, how nice, he's offering to take care of them in case something happens! That Donnie's really not such a bad hick when you get past the wife beating and that mangy facial hair! Oh wait, he was THREATENING Annie's life... I get it now... boy, Donnie's such a prick!
Apparently addicted to tarot card readings and hoping that one day her fortune won't include Donnie hitting her repeatedly with a tire iron, Val shows up at Annie's house a few days later, looking for some psychic advice. No sooner does she drag Annie away from one of her other clients, Donnie's busted through the front door, grabbed his errant wife by the hair, swatted her a few times and dragged her out to his pick-up, cursing and threatening Annie all the way. And the cops refuse to do anything, cuz they "know" Donnie, and he'd NEVER do something threatening toward others, especially not a WOMAN! Later that day, Annie gets a visit from her grandmother's ghost, bearing gifts of fruit and bad tidings of a coming storm... boring! That night, Annie sows us that though she's a widow, she's not dead, as she attends some garden party with a friend. Here she chats it up with Wayne (Kinnear), principal of the local school, and the two engage in a little Amish flirting. That's what boring people do when they're trying to get laid. But, Wayne's engaged, so you'd think Annie wouldn't have a chance, right? Considering Wayne's fiancée Jessica (Holmes) like to whore around with half of the guys in town, I don't think his flirting with Annie's really going to matter much in the eyes of the National Inquirer... though I wouldn't put it past the Weekly World News to add a 500lb alien baby of Elvis to the mix and print it. Mmmmmm, I could really go for a Page 5 Girl right about now.
Anyway, Jessica turns out to be less an obstacle than expected, since she's turns up missing soon after. As for Donnie, he's continued harassing Annie with phone calls and late night visits to her house. He's also started threatening her through her sons, as he gets a hold of the middle son and tells him that his mom's a witch and someday somebody's gonna burn her like one. This frightening scene is soon remedied though, when a friend of Annie's, the mentally unstable auto-mechanic Buddy (Ribisi), decides to defend our heroine's honor... BY GOING MEDIEVAL CRAZY ON DONNIE'S TRUCK! Yeah, Buddy fucks up Donnie's ride real good with a crowbar, smashing in the windows and denting up the passenger side door! You'd be surprised how a guy who works on cars all day can snap like that and beat the shit out of a defenseless Bronco! After the oft-suicidal Buddy stares down Donnie and his revolver, the evil redneck and his driver burn rubber, probably back to his house where he can threaten and intimidate people all day long, as long as they're his brain dead wife and a bunch of empty beer cans. Yeah Donnie! Show them Budweiser cans who’s boss Donnie, hyuk, hyuk! I hate rednecks... Anyway, after doing every bit of nothing to find Jessica, the local "we don't take kindly to your type 'round here" law enforcement's plum outta ideas, so they turn to Annie and her GIFT in the hopes that it will reveal something that their coffee and éclairs couldn't.
Though she sees nothing in her flash cards at first, that night Annie sees images of Jes, chained and naked, floating in her tree. She also gets a vivid image of where the babe's body is, when she sees a swamp surrounded by white flowers and an old crazy dude strumming on his fiddle like Hendrix on PCP! When she goes to the Sheriff the next day and tells him about it, he reveals that there is ONE fiddle playing old geezer in town, and his land HAPPENS to border on the property of, who else, Donnie Barksdale. Oh, and he's also got a pond on his property... this is way too easy. So, the cops head to Donnie's pond, run some chains and hooks through it, and low and behold, Donnie shows up. Not happy with the fuzz playing in his pond, Donnie decides to place his anger on the one person on the scene without any form of defense, and nails Annie in the gut with a fist! Wayne, who's there to see if his fiancée’s really dead there or not, rallies back with a swing of his own, clobbering Donnie's hairy jowls. Just then, surprise surprise, the cops' hooks dig up... Jessica's pale naked corpse. Looks like Donnie's got a date with a jury.
The movie spills into the courtroom now as Donnie's put on trial. For his lawyer he gets stuck with that little bald weirdo with the moustache from "Evening Shade". He's meaner than he looks though, when we watch him cross-examine the shit out of Annie till her ass bleeds! Not only does Annie have to deal with Donnie's bloodthirsty lawyer and Donnie's "shootin buddies" waiting to harass her in front of the courthouse each day, but Buddy, to whom Annie is his only friend, is bugging her about some kind of blue diamond and a fetish for spanking his monkeybone while thinking of his dad... Jeezus, psychic powers just aren't worth it! She's more like a $2 psychiatrist! If I had those powers, I'd be looking into my future to see how likely my chances are of killing every last backwoods pig fucker in town and getting away with it... or just to play the lottery, heh heh. Later that night, after brushing Buddy off and focusing on her problems instead, Ann gets a phone call from Buddy's mom, frantically spewing something about Buddy going wacko and threatening to kill his father! By the time she gets there, Buddy's got daddy strapped to a chair with duct tape and has beaten him into a fat, half naked, bloody mess with a belt! The retribution doesn't stop there and Buddy douses the fat old fuck with gasoline, then gets to do what Mr. Blonde never did: make a human BBQ! Yep, Buddy's dad is soon bathed in purifying flames, boiled alive in his own bubbling fat and singed chest hair! He deserves it too, cuz that fat disgusting bastard used to make young Buddy taste his tube steak beefaroni, which explains the whole "blue diamond" thing Buddy was babbling about this whole time... cuz there's such a diamond tattooed on that overweight pedophile's stomach... I feel ill.
With all this emotional trauma with the trial and her mentally handicapped friend turning his dick sucking daddy into flambé, what better time for Annie to get off some frustration by "consoling" Wayne in his time of need? Hey, with Jes outta the picture, Ann's got nothing but open ice between Wayne's stick and her goal! However, even though she's been having nothing but freaked out lesbian orgies with Rosey Palm and her five sisters for the past year, Annie still feels like she's married to her husband's smoldering remains and can't bring herself to ride Mr. Wayne's Wild Ride. Instead she has some more hallucinations about Jes, who seems to be threatening her, or warning her, or trying to give her "Twin Peaks" type clues. Fearing for her life and her sanity, Ann high tails it over to the District Attorney's house and demands he reopen Jes's case, because she doesn't think Donnie killed her. If he doesn't, then Ann will reveal that she saw Mr. D.A. sticking his Tab A into Jes's loose and sloppy Slot B... yeah, she was quite the slot before she died... like you're any funnier?! If you're such a wild and crazy guy, where's YOUR website ass plug?! Damn it, enough of these tangents, let me finish my review! Sorry folks, you know how imaginary voices in your head can get sometimes.
When Ann tells Wayne about her visions of Jes, she suggests that returning to the pond may bring up some psychic residue and help her figure out who really killed the skank. In a move that I can only blame Billy Bob Thorton's unoriginal dumb ass brain for forming, Wayne turns out to be the killer. Annie witnesses it all, as Wayne discovered Jes's cheatin' heart, slapped her around a little like Donnie did, then slamming her head off his truck and strangling her when she called off their marriage. Annie might've gotten out of this uncomfortable situation had she seduced Wayne into a tangled web of etc., but she instead throws a crawdad cage at him, and he replies with a flashlight upside her head. He's getting ready to deliver the final blow and take out his sole witness (like her voodoo testimony would stand up in a court of these in-breeders), in comes Buddy, wielding a clubbin' light of his own, which he connects to the side of Wayne's cranium! He says he escaped from the local mental institute and happened to show up just in time to make the heroic save. They toss the villainous principal into Annie's trunk and haul him to the police station/24 hour donut hut. Something doesn't sit right with Annie's story though, cuz Buddy hung himself at the loony bin several hours prior to his supposed flashlight incident... hallucination or guardian angel mechanic ghost? Who's to say and, more importantly, who's to care? It's over and that's good.
Billy Bob Thorton's a hack. He got whacked out on moonshine one Friday night, went down to Blockbuster to visit his lover/step-sister, impregnated her in the back room where they store the porno, grabbed a copy of What Lies Beneath and a pint of Scotch (to go with his new "Scotch" hat) and headed home. Afterwards, we learned that giving a drunken moron a crappy movie and a typewriter is a bad thing. Think I'm full of shit and THE GIFT in no way resembled a What Lies Beneath rip-off? Well, kindly take your head from your dog's anus and look at the evidence: What Lies Beneath involves somebody sleeping around, somebody getting killed and dumped in a lake/pond, a "no brainer" ending, and numerous visions of a dead woman and water... The alcohol just allowed Thorton to twist around some of the situation, he threw in psychic powers and a second ghost, and when he woke up the next morning, he found THIS script soaking in his own vomit... and a lot of Vaseline smeared all over his ass. Not having a single remembrance of What Lies Beneath thanks to his excessive alcohol intake, but in possession of a talent to read his own vomit smeared drunken rantings, Billy Bob looked at this miraculous script-from-nowhere as a "gift" from "God"... or the beer fairy, hence the title: The Gift.
Luckily, we're spared, because for some reason Mr. Evil Dead Sam Raimi took up the directing chores and made this movie at least LOOK good. The settings and shots really felt like a big budget Evil Dead movie and the transitions were nice and smooth. Though it wasn't the fucked out madcap insanity and intensity of an Evil Dead flick, I still thank you Sam Raimi, for evening out an otherwise bumpy and turbulence heavy flight. But, bad story, nice direction, either way I get fed up with Southern fried folk REAL quick. I hated just about every character in this film. Whether they were cops, lawyers, or just morons wearing baseball caps emblazoned with the logo of their favorite tractor manufacturing company while riding around in their rusted out Chevy pick-ups, swiggin' Old Milwaukees... and that's just Billy Bob's relatives who came to visit the set! I hate them ALL! Every last cow-tipping, moon shining, wife beating, country music loving, Ned Beatty sodomizing one of them! Good thing for me though, that the closest any of these dirt sucking shitheads will ever come to reading this review, or coming into contact with a computer of any kind, will be when they pass Radio Shack on their way to the local "Chug 'N' Puke All Nite Booze and XXX Magazine Emporium" to pick up some kegs and home brewery yeast. Even if they did see it and, by some strange coincidence, understood that I'm insulting them, they'd instantly lose their concentration when they saw the word "Emporium", which they would then spend the next 12 hours trying to decipher with their friends over a rousing game of "shoot the broken down Dodge behind Bosephus's house"... Okay, that's too many random rant sessions, I gotta go lay down... preferably underneath Katie Holmes... well, her unconscious body... she's too stupid to be allowed to talk. Just two last words: Keanu Reeves, even with a glued on beard and a new found love of racism, STILL can't pull off the villain angle. Lastly, you get to see Katie Holmes topless in nothing but panties... now, good night and good fuck!
The Moral of the Story: Errr, rednecks are all wife beating, child molesting drunkards who deserve to be whomped in the skull with shovels and left to die in shallow bogs? Yeah, that'll work.
H.O.P.E.L.E.S.S. Rating: 
- Too much style and "substance" here for a H.O.P.E.L.E.S.S. party atmosphere. Maybe a decent view with your significant other, but not a party.
If You Liked This Flick, Check Out: What Lies Beneath or Rosemary's Baby
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