Southern psychic on the skids

>> Telepathy and screwy stereotypes can't save The Gift from being predictable

by MATTHEW HAYS

It's certainly got promising credits. With Sam Raimi directing, Billy Bob Thornton co-scripting and Cate Blanchett, Keanu Reeves, Greg Kinnear and Hilary Swank starring, one would think The Gift would be a sure-fire hit.

And there are some things to merit the moody, Southern-U.S.-set horror film. Perhaps most noteworthy is Blanchett, as the film's centrepiece. She's a struggling widow, still grappling with guilt about her husband's death in a work-related accident. The guilt comes because Blanchett has an on-again, off-again "gift," the ability to see things as they happened or are going to happen. For reasons beyond her control, she didn't manage to predict her husband's fate.

Now she's scraping a living together, in large part due to gifts she gets from townsfolk in return for her psychic card readings. Some view her as a kind of saviour (Giovanni Ribisi comes to her for help in dealing with memories of an abusive father, while Swank grapples with her physically threatening husband Reeves); others see her as a Satanic witch. Blanchett's depiction of a psychic is utterly empathetic and Raimi has created what is perhaps the most dimensional portrait of someone with otherwordly powers in quite some time. The film suffers, by contrast, in its depiction of Southerners, who are pictured in the film as narrow-minded, wife-beating, incestuous, stupid and drunk.

Things turn truly nasty after one especially slutty woman goes missing. Is she dead? If so, who killed her and where is her body? Once dismissive of her psychic skills, relatives of the missing woman (including worried husband Kinnear) approach Blanchett to see if she can help them locate her. Sure enough, the corpse is at the bottom of a lake on Reeves' property. The mystery seems simple enough: the wife-beater did it.

But Blanchett's horrifying visions tell her something different, and she's soon convinced that, despite Reeves' evil nature, he's innocent where this particular murder is concerned. The Gift then morphs into a fairly routine whodunit, with a variety of the townsfolk emerging as suspects. (They're all so decidedly sordid it could be virtually anyone.)

The Gift is competently handled, but suffers after the far-too-similar, woman's-ghost-is-trying-desperately-to-tell-me-how-she-was-done-in movie, last summer's What Lies Beneath. There are some decent frights here, but ultimately everything feels far, far too predictable. With this much talent involved, in particular the sure hand of director Raimi, we might have expected something a bit more surprising and less well-travelled.

The Gift opens Friday, Jan. 19