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I may see dead people but then, by God, I do something about it,” Odd Thomas (Anton Yelchin) a fry cook in Pico Mundo California states. He is not a passive interactor with the other side; he interacts with spirits who then need assistance in getting justice, just like in the opening scene where he meets the killer of a little girl who goes to him for assistance. What comes next is a scene that sets ‘Odd Thomas’ up for failure. Odd chases the killer through neighborhoods to a pool party and Sommers’ action trick catch whether it is learned from “The Mummy” and “Van Helsing” drowns the whole cast in headache inducing nonsense. I mean quick zooms, slo-mo fights, loud techno music, freeze frame – it’s overused gimmicks, but one can feel right off the bat that an inherently flawed project is being enveloped in all elements to cover its lack of coherent narrative and character development. It looks like a low budget rip-off version of scream that they put straight to VHS.
Odd is dating Stormy Llewellyn (Addison Timlin) – I know, right? – but Sommers’s rendition of Koontz’s novel is so dependent on the flailing, paranormal story that we are completely indifferent to the Odd-Stormy relationship that was so pivotal to the original. The casting is completely botched because Yelchin and Timlin do not have any romantic chemistry, which is baffling given how difficult it must be for a casting director to find two people who are supposed to fall in love with each other. Timlin has an enigmatic screen presence and captured the otherwise mediocre “Best Man Down” last year, but she is simply lifeless and useless in this role. Those who enjoyed the book will understand that an “Odd Thomas” without a captivating Stormy is a lost cause. Dafoe looks disinterested as the cop who knows Odd’s secret, and Oswalt cameos to remind book fans that there was a good character in the story who has been reduced to a plot device.
In the beginning, Odd has a vision where faceless people in bowling shirts are being shot at while screaming for his assistance. It is hard to imagine how he would stage a vision like that. It works adequately in text, but figuring out how to make it cinematic is a challenge that Sommers wasn’t suited for. Instead of fear inducing, it is just clunky. And Yelchin does not sell the tension of the vision or the later part where “Bodachs“, who are creatures that Thomas sees when something terrible is about to happen, show up. He is an interesting actor, but Yelchin is hung out to dry by a writer/director who does not know how to build tension and does not care for character.
Odd has a premonition that something bad is going to happen, and we know he is going to stop it because there is no movie otherwise. So, ‘Odd Thomas’ becomes a movie that is simply progressng without any character, style, or setting, and therefore becomes intricately less engaging. Sommers and his team depend on Koontz’s book for the screenplay, but do not understand that it is the character of Odd Thomas that made the novel a bestseller, unlike his wife who happens to be a wisecracking medium and a fry cook. Instead of giving Odd the well-rounded character he deserves, they resorted to cheap special effects, overblown camera angles, and poorly executed supporting roles which gives the impression that the movie is dead on arrival.
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