Kathmandu

There is a credo that could be well applied to those who write for films and it goes like this —

“I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge.

That myth is more potent that history.

That dreams are more powerful than facts.

That hope always triumphs over experience.

That the laughter is the only cure for grief.

And I believe that love is stronger than death.”

It is what created those really good movies like Big Fish, Princess Bride and even the hard-nosed Western like Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid. It was a belief in magic. Director Joshua Michael Stern uses an extraordinary cast headed by Sir Ian McKellen with Aaron Eckhart, Jessica Lange, Nick Nolte and William Hurt to bring this philosophy to the screen but what he succeeds in doing is lighting a colourful, puzzling damp squib.

Neverwas goes off in too many directions at once. A young man (Aaron Eckhart) tries to come to terms with his father (Nick Nolte) who commits suicide after writing a famous children’s book called Neverwas. Sir Ian McKellen is the patient in an institution where Eckhart goes to work as psychiatrist. Ian McKellen and love interest Brittany Murphy are still fans of Neverwas and see the book as something of a metaphor for beliefs.

Says Brian Webster, “Eckhart stars as Zach Riley, a young hot-shot psychiatrist who takes a job in his hometown to work at the mental hospital where his father spent time prior to his death.

Before long, Zach has befriended Ally (Murphy), a childhood neighbour, with romantic potential reverberating at their every meeting, and he has discovered that there’s a long-time patient at the hospital (McKellen) with a connection to Zach’s past that he never expected. As Zach tries to figure out how this could be, he also struggles with his own childhood flashbacks, plus encounters some significant difficulties with Ally.

Perhaps the best thing about Neverwas is that it keeps you off-balance, never quite sure what it’s getting at and what we’re going to discover next.

The acting is sound, with everyone pulling their weight, from Eckhart’s perplexed boy scout, to Murphy’s sweetie with a secret, McKellen’s whacko who might not be so whacko, Lange’s I’ve-lived-more-life-than-I-can-cope-with, to Hurt’s benign cynicism as the head shrink at the hospital. They’re all just fine, but the movie ultimately doesn’t hit home with the intended emotional impact, not because it falls outside a standard cubby-hole, but rather because the emotions here are muddled and just don’t all ring true.”

The past few years have set up a trend in a certain kind of movie which shows you everything and then pulls it apart. Derailed was one, The Illusionist was another, Criminal and so on... Now comes Butterfly On A Wheel or Shattered (as it now wants to be called) has Pierce Brosnan as a seemingly cool-blooded killer and kidnapper, Gerard Butler and Maria Bello as a seemingly successful happily married couple being forced by Brosnan to do one thing after another in ascending order of horror until Brosnan puts a gun in Butler’s hand and asks him to shoot a man if he wants to see his daughter alive. Only when he goes in for the kill Butler discovers a woman and the plot becomes a complete surprise. This is not a great movie but it certainly is good one. Director Mike Barker and writer William Morrissey will have you getting a start at the end if you see what I mean. I didn’t expect a 360 degree turn about and you won’t either.