The 9th Life of Louis Drax is a very strange R rated children’s movie… or something. To be fair, I’d not heard of this movie – no trailers, never heard of the book, only knew a couple of the stars – when I decided to give it a shot at the local theater… so I went in knowing nothing. Which often works out well but here it worked out weird. Since it opens with a child’s narration and has fanciful opening credits, I thought it was a kid’s movie but then some of the gory imagery and swearing convinced me otherwise. Not saying this makes the movie good or bad but certainly makes it tonally confusing.
The movie is about a young boy who has survived 8 strange accidents in his young life. When the movie opens, he has plunged off a cliff, his dad (played by Aaron Paul) has gone missing, and his mother is in shock. They think the boy is dead but he turns out he’s in a coma with significant internal injuries (bye-bye spleen!). A neurologist played by Jamie Dornan is brought in to consult, there are flashbacks to psychological exams with Oliver Platt, and the movie just kind of bounces between weird fantasy sequences and the past while the docs try to figure out how to reach a comatose boy in the present.
This wasn’t a very good film. It ultimately just bored me. I’m not sure if that’s because it couldn’t settle on a tone and introduced fantastical creatures to no apparent affect or was trying to be a medical drama, or a love triangle, or what. So, yeah, I guess the mishmash tone didn’t hold my interest.
There is a moderately satisfying conclusion to the movie – one that’s dark and twisted and more-or-less works. It’s implications make the movie even darker and grimmer than it already was. Overall though, this can be skipped… if you’ve even heard of it at all.
Score: 68