***SPOILER ALERT! SPOILER ALERT!*** A good thriller--better than the flashy, over-emphatic Shutter Island--but not more than that. Still, good is good and I'm not knocking it. I enjoyed the movie. Brosnan was really impressive. It was shrewd of Polanski to cast him (he needed a star to give the small role heft) and it took balls for Brosnan to take the role. Also, the directing was usually first rate and had some really creepy effects. BUT a few big problems, which don't make THE GHOST WRITER a bad movie, prevent it from being better than good. I won't write further about the good things in it (others have done so) but here's why I was disappointed and why I give it no higher than 7 out of 10. (REMEMBER SPOILER ALERT! READ NO FURTHER IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN IT!) When the Ghost is given the room of his dead predecessor whose belongings have not been cleared out, it's a tip-off that's too obvious. First, the crowd that runs this house would have gone through it with a fine tooth comb and got rid of everything a.s.a.p. Second, we know that once the Ghost moves in he's going to find something incriminating. Then there's the ending. Why does the Ghost tell the wife what he's found (which I assume is what's in the note he passes to her)? Given her company's record of murder and its attempted murder of him, it's like a suicide note. And the staging of the final scene is so unoriginal it's not worthy of Polanski. After the Ghost walks out of the frame and the camera stays put on the street, we know--if we've seen Hitchcock's FAMILY PLOT and other flicks that use the same device--that the street is waiting for a killer car to drive down it for you-know-what.
Review of The Ghost Writer
