Film Reviews

Majestic

• Rating:
• Director: Frank Darabont
• Starring: Allen Garfield
• Details: US / 152 minutes / (12PG).

In another one of his Oscar baiting roles - think The Truman Show without the sense of wonder - Jim Carrey plays Peter Appleton, a Hollywood screenwriter just breaking into the business around 1951. After his name is given to the Communist witch hunters, Appleton is blacklisted from the business, and believes his career is over. After a drunken crash into a river, he wakes up in a small upstate Californian town called Lawson, suffering from amnesia. Things get a little more complicated when Peter is mistaken for a missing war hero, with even the man's father (Martin Landau) eager to believe that a miracle has happened. Although the idiotic premise may indicate otherwise, Majestic is bereft of anything even resembling a sense of humour. Instead what Darabont has constructed here is a self-important movie, drenched in a sickeningly sweet coat of sentimentality and dewy nostalgia. Taking itself far too seriously and far too long and muddled in its logic to be effective, The Majestic is a pointless and tiresome excursion.

Review by Garreth Murphy