The film plays out like a Technicolour fever dream as reality meets fiction meets fantasy through the eyes of Robert Downey Jr's Dan Dark, a long-suffering author with an eye-watering painful looking skin condition.
Downey is on top form, and the gradual erosion of the boundaries between fantasy and reality is extremely effective as characters from the page walk into Dark's real world and vice versa.
His illness represents the decay apparent in his life since his difficult childhood, and all the clever metaphors therein are exploited beyond the obvious.
Downey is, as always, fantastic- the scenes with Mel Gibson a delight, and Robin Wright Penn exudes a vulnerable warmth in her role as his long suffering wife. Adrien Brody's presence is superfluous; still when he is on screen he's pretty darn good.
It's a film that's not as clever as it thinks it is, though- all that smart symbolism is explored beyond the plot of the story until it becomes an exercise in showing you how to be clever on film, though failing because it's so obvious.
Great performances, and all in all a wonderfully bold- yet fragile staging- of an a descent into illness and redemption, but flawed in it's brash attempt to overwhelm the audience with clever twists and turns and techniques which ultimately give the impression it's trying far too hard to be subversive.
Downey is on top form, and the gradual erosion of the boundaries between fantasy and reality is extremely effective as characters from the page walk into Dark's real world and vice versa.
His illness represents the decay apparent in his life since his difficult childhood, and all the clever metaphors therein are exploited beyond the obvious.
Downey is, as always, fantastic- the scenes with Mel Gibson a delight, and Robin Wright Penn exudes a vulnerable warmth in her role as his long suffering wife. Adrien Brody's presence is superfluous; still when he is on screen he's pretty darn good.
It's a film that's not as clever as it thinks it is, though- all that smart symbolism is explored beyond the plot of the story until it becomes an exercise in showing you how to be clever on film, though failing because it's so obvious.
Great performances, and all in all a wonderfully bold- yet fragile staging- of an a descent into illness and redemption, but flawed in it's brash attempt to overwhelm the audience with clever twists and turns and techniques which ultimately give the impression it's trying far too hard to be subversive.