Review: Tedium, not terror, in 'Ninth Gate'

By Reviewer Paul Tatara

March 30, 2000
Web posted at: 3:15 p.m. EST (2015 GMT)

In this story: A devilish book deal Books, bodies, boredom A flop from a master RELATED STORIES, SITES

(CNN) -- Legendary director Roman Polanski's "The Ninth Gate" is supposed to be a supernatural thriller, but it seems more like a vaguely satanic crossword puzzle. It's tedious beyond belief and not even remotely frightening.

For whatever reasons, Polanski has been struggling since the mid-1980s, directing films that are either too vague or too preposterous for their own good. His grasp of the human psyche's darkest corners has already resulted in at least three honestly disturbing movies, so it's not like he's on unsure ground when it comes to devil worshipping.

But "The Ninth Gate" mopes around like it's looking for its first cup of coffee in the morning, and the only jolt of excitement comes about an hour after you've given up caring what happens.

Johnny Depp plays Dean Corso, a greasy-haired New York book expert who's willing to lie, cheat, and steal to get his hands on especially rare tomes. Rich collectors pay Corso handsomely for his troubles, despite his bad reputation in the book world. In Depp's first scene, he snows a man and woman who have recruited him to appraise their stroke-victim father's library. He convinces the poor suckers to sell him an original copy of "Don Quixote" for what turns out to be a fraction of its actual value. Later, a book-dealer friend (James Russo) sarcastically chastises Corso for his crooked ways, but Corso simply doesn't care what people think of him. His expertise springs from genuine passion, and his occasionally shady job allows him to probe antique collections that book connoisseurs consider sacrosanct.

Corso is soon commissioned by a mysterious multimillionaire named Boris Balkan (Frank Langella) to track down the remaining copies of a 17th-century book he owns called "The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of the Shadows." The movie opens with the suicide of a collector who recently sold his copy to Balkan. Later, the code that Balkan punches into an alarm system before he and Corso enter his library is "666."

Gee, something seems suspicious. Balkan tells Corso that the book was co-authored by Satan himself, and that he has his reasons for wanting to possess all of the copies.

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Corso accepts this lunacy with the same numbed composure that he applies to virtually every other situation. For instance, he seems more fascinated than frightened when one of his friends turns up murdered. And he doesn't even bat an eye when an old woman (Barbara Jefford) tells him that she no longer belongs to a cult because she got too old for the orgies.

You'd think, given the set-up and Polanski's creepy track record, that a few heavy-duty jolts could be generated from all of this. Well, think again.

Corso just trails the books, interviews people who may or may not know anything about them, gets ever-so-slightly rattled, then heads back to his hotel to sweat and swill Scotch.

Even the supporting characters are humdrum. Lena Olin plays the seductive wife of the man who killed himself, and she's about as frightening as an angry hooker. She and Depp have an erotic sex scene together after he interrogates her, then she brutally attacks him in a manner that borders on amusing. Polanski's wife, Emmanuelle Seigner, also shows up as a possible witch who's following Corso around Europe. In one scene she fights off an attacker with a series of kung-fu kicks that would make David Carradine proud.

Polanski always invests his horror films with an off-kilter sense of humor, so maybe these giggle inducers are intentional. But this time around the humor blunts pure monotony, and that's certainly not the objective.

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Polanski is famous in film circles for knowing virtually everything there is to know about every aspect of shooting a movie. Happily, his technical skills are still in full evidence in "The Ninth Gate." He just seems a great deal less than interested, something that you never detect in his most satisfying movies.

"Repulsion" (1965) is a masterpiece of first-person narrative, with the beautiful Catherine Deneuve turning into a near-silent, razor-wielding psychotic before your very eyes. "Rosemary's Baby" (1968) is a classic of the horror genre, perhaps the scariest movie you'll ever see that takes place mostly in broad daylight. "The Tenant" (1976), though extremely confusing, is intentionally hilarious and utterly disturbing. And "Chinatown" (1974) is runs neck and neck with "The Godfather" (1972) as the single greatest film of the 1970s.

It was recently announced that Polanski's next movie will deal with the Holocaust, and that sounds promising. His mother and father were both imprisoned at Auschwitz when he was very young (his mother eventually died there), and he was forced to hide in Nazi-occupied territory until the war's end. Polanski used to inject genre films with his private misgivings about human existence, but his less-imposing recent work has consisted mostly of rote genre back flips.

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He needs to get personal again. We badly need directors who are capable of real vision, and Polanski is truly brilliant when he's at the top of his game. If the next one stinks, he may want to hang it up for good.

"The Ninth Gate" is a big, fat, sleeping pill. There's violence, profanity, some sex, allusions to perversion, and a lot of demonic hullabaloo. Rated R. 127 long minutes, as opposed to minutes long.

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January 14, 2000
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Official 'Ninth Gate' site
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