If the sole presence of Morgan Freeman is not enough to save a film, this movie has no redeeming qualities. “Dreamcatcher” crosses the line of terrible with wild abandon, and Freeman’s presence merely adds to the movie’s shame.
“Dreamcatcher” begins as a confusing series of incidents where the audience learns about four main characters’ awkward telekinetic powers. The film quickly stumbles into the cheap-horror genre, where dialogue is cheap and blood flows quickly, for it is breathtakingly gruesome and just as dense.
Thomas Jane, Jason Lee, Damien Lewis and Timothy Olyphant play Henry, Beaver, Jonesy and Pete (in that order). As children, the four friends rescue a local boy with a mental disability from bullies. After his rescue, “Duddits” befriends the four boys and instills telepathic powers in them. The four can listen to each other’s thoughts and, in some cases, others’ thoughts.
Fast forward 20 years. The four friends meet in a cabin in the snowy woods to hunt deer and discuss their old friend Duddits, as they have done once a year for the past two decades. While hunting one morning, Henry finds a stranger lost in the woods and apparently suffering from exhaustion. Henry brings the stranger into the cabin, and while nursing the man back to health discovers the stranger is violently ill.
The film digresses into a monster/horror flick full of predictable death. Apparently aliens have landed on Earth, and a military group led by Col. Kurtz (Morgan Freeman) quarantines the area to destroy aliens and the strange sickness they carry with them. Freeman does not make his character dynamic in any way; his is a stock character, a gung-ho military leader determined to carry out his mission.
An abundance of mysterious intestinal gas invades the bodies of many characters and begins the film’s steep downward spiral. This portends the remainder of the movie’s content — unnecessarily grotesque and numbingly bad.
At points the film encourages laughter. It conjures memories of “Jason X,” which similarly is funny not because it is humorous, but because it is dumb. Random and pointless scenes poke out from the main plot, including one when a character uses a handgun as a telepathic telephone.
The movie has a few interesting ideas that go nowhere, though. The telepathic connection the main characters share intrigues, but the filmmakers trade exploration of that idea for hungry, ferocious monsters. Another intriguing idea emerges from Jonesy as he explains to his friends his internal “Memory Warehouse,” visualized as a sort of tower-like library with stained glass and hundreds of shelves of transcribed memories. Jonesy later reveals he may mentally retreat into the warehouse of his mind. The script later abandons this idea, leaving it exploited yet unexplained, another great idea wasted.
The few redeeming qualities of the movie lie in the quirkiness of some of the characters. Jason Lee’s character chews toothpicks as quickly and as often as a two-pack-a-day smoker smokes cigarettes. Damien Lewis has an excellent American accent. Timothy Olyphant has a semi-funny drunk scene. But besides these little bits of interest, “Dreamcatcher” fails on almost every level but special effects.