S. Darko: A Donnie Darko Tale Reviews

There was a reason Richard Kelly steered clear of the sequel to Donnie Darko, his head-tripping cult phenomenon. Nothing about that tightly resolved film indicated there was any need for another chapter. But where profit is possible, sequels are probable, so out came S. Darko, which follows Donnie's haunted younger sister, Samantha, on a cross-country road trip with a friend. Its straight-to-video status pretty much squashed those dreams of profit, but the film still had a chance to please fans. Plus, revisiting the visual iconography of Donnie Darko -- watery wormholes extending from character's chests, a demonic rabbit mask -- might have yielded results, on a good day. But the story they chose to tell is a confused mess. Samantha and her companion encounter a Gulf War vet, a posse of throwback hipster locals, a couple nutty religious figures, a shy kid being transformed by his contact with a meteorite, time travel, and quite possibly, the end of the world. Even repeat viewings won't shed much light on the interrelationship of these disparate elements. Donnie Darko didn't project as a conventional movie, either, but Kelly's vision, and the cast he assembled to execute it, brought it together marvelously. Here, Chris Fisher's pacing is slow and ponderous, and his preoccupation with flat visual metaphors seems amateurish. Plus, the acting drops off in a major way. Weakest is the only returning cast member, Daveigh Chase as Samantha. After a busy career as a child actress, she's now showing some seriously wooden tendencies. Then again, Chase didn't have much to work with. Her Samantha has no objective, and is written as a passive observer. When you don't even get to be the protagonist in your own story, it's hard to have much impact, let alone satisfy a built-in audience hoping for lightning to strike twice.