By Emilio Frenk.
Director: Gore Verbinski
Cast: Dane DeHaan, Jason Isaacs, Mia Goth, Ivo Nandi, Adrian Schiller, Celia Imrie, Harry Groener and Peter Benedict.
Rating: Average.
Academy Award Winning Director Gore Verbinski, is back after 4 years after “The Lone Ranger” and he does it with “A Cure for Wellness” and despite of having good moments the execution was poor.
The movie tells the story of Lockhart (Dane DeHaan) an ambitious young executive from New York who is asked to go to the Swiss Alps to rescue Pembroke, the CEO of the company that he works for, who is missing.
Lockhart accepts and goes to Switzerland where he suffers a car accident and is hospitalized in a in a “Wellness Center” run by Dr. Heinrich Volmer (Jason Isaacs).
In the Wellness Center, Lockhart will find out about the dark secrets of the wellnesse center and what they really do with their patients.
Now Lockhart will be in a race against time to not only rescue Pembroke but the get out of the center alive and sane before it´s too late.
Gore Verbinski is a director that is well known for doing impressive and striking visual films, making it one of his main trademarks and with “A Cure for Wellness” it´s not the exception.
The movie is beautifully by Bojan Bazelli and he achieved on capturing both contrasts of what happens when Dane DeHann´s character is in the institute and out of the facility.
The major problem that I saw in “ A Cure for Wellness” was the screenplay written by Justin Haythe, who wrote “The Lone Ranger” making his second collaboration with Verbinski and it had a lot of flaws.
The opening was very well made and it had an interesting first act but after that it went downhill and I saw a movie that was going nowhere.
I think that for moments became to predictable and was a rip off of other movies like “The Shining”, “Marathon Man” and “Shutter Island” to name a few.
The movie was to slow and for a movie of this genre the timing is crucial.
Gore Verbinski had one major flop recently with “The Lone Ranger” in 2013 and here I saw a movie that was too long and the length could have been shorter.
Verbinski has directed many good films like the first “Pirates of The Carribbean” film, “Rango” and “The Weather Man” which are very good films and I have to say memorable.
I do think here that Verbinski was more focused on the look of the film than the story itself, leading to his cast to perform poorly.
Dane DeHaan is really talented as an actor but I didn´t believe his character in this film and I did not feel any sympathy for him either.
I hope this is a learning experience for Gore Verbinski which I have to say that I have enjoyed his movies in the past but this one I didn´t and the movie did lead to instant boredom.
With that being said “A Cure for Wellness” is a good visual experience but as a movie it didn´t deliver the goods and I cannot recommend it.