Shutter Island / After finally winning the Best Picture Academy Award for The Departed, if anyone deserves to cut loose and have some fun, it’s director extraordinaire Martin Scorsese. If you gave the world Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and Goodfellas, and still didn’t win Best Picture Oscar for any of them, finally getting the golden statue merits the right to do whatever the hell you want. But when the result is the unexpectedly unthrilling thriller Shutter Island, that’s a cinematic abuse of power.

Faithfully based on the Dennis Lehane page-turner–screenwriter Laeta Kalogridis (Alexander) practically photo-copied the novel–Shutter Island takes place at a mental asylum in 1954. Current Scorsese muse Leonardo DiCaprio plays Edward “Teddy” Daniels, a US marshal arriving by boat on the island, which is off the coast of Massachusetts.

One of the institution’s patients has vanished from her cell, apparently into thin air. With the support of his jovial partner Chuck (Mark Ruffalo), Teddy investigates the case of the missing woman as a hurricane rages into the night and the insane inmates howl amid the dark hospital walls. But are there darker secrets lurking in the shadows? Has the malevolent staff drugged Teddy to see torturous, gruesome hallucinations of his wartime experiences at the Dachau concentration camp as well as his deceased wife (Michelle Williams), who died in an apartment fire? Most importantly, will he be able to escape Shutter Island?

All the elements of a crackling good, pulpy horror flick are here but somehow things don’t take off. Scorsese is no stranger to elevating standard B-movie fare (he did in Cape Fear), but here everything hinges on an M. Night Shyamalan twist ending. Thus, all that occurs in the film’s 2-hour, 18-minute runtime is in service to what turns out to be a gimmick–and if there’s anybody who should be above cheap gimmicks, it’s Scorsese.

The thrills of this thriller very much depend on that particular element of surprise, so in a way, the actors must build double-performances; the work must hold up on repeat viewings after the “a-ha!” Sixth Sense ending. As our hero and guide through the fortress of insanity, DiCaprio does what he can with a script that really only requires him to alternately bulge his eyeballs or to squint to suggest intensity. Max Von Sydow gets to be his usual malevolently smug self as a German doctor, and Ben Kingsley as the island’s medical curator has the tricky job of appearing both duplicitously sinister and vehemently against the era’s method of preferred psychiatric treatment: lobotomies.

The best performances though are cameo appearances by Jackie Earle Haley (Watchmen) and Patricia Clarkson (Good Night, and Good Luck), but one can’t really say much about them since certain plot points that should remain a shock hinges on their characters’ identities.

Along the way we get swooping, claustrophobic shots of circular lighthouse staircases, conveniently flickering light bulbs, matches that flame on with exploding jolts and a Hitchcockian, Bernard Herrmann-like score with loud, blaring horns that practically punctuate strikes of lightning. And yet, the proceedings aren’t as scary, or even as urgent, as they should be. Teddy lopes along investigating the disappearance, figuring out coded mind games, tramping around in the rain and scaling cliff walls rock by rock. The pacing is almost somnambulic with no real sense of danger. Are there deeper questions regarding the over-use of medication in the psychiatry field, the horrors of war, the instinctive prediliction for violence in men, or even the demons that reside in us?

At one point, Teddy asks, “Which would be worse? To live as a monster or to die as a good man?” Considering the doozy of a climax, these philosophical inquires are simply filler.

With a Martin Scorsese film, one can’t help but expect–and deserve–more than a rote, plodding pace and irresponsibly handled screenplay tricks. Shutter Island is a B-movie, haunted-house chiller that’s neither haunted enough nor B enough.

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