Tucked away in a remote area of a Maine, four friends have gathered to relax and celebrate their friendship as they have done for the past twenty years. The friends are a diverse lot; there is the Psychologist Henry (Thomas Jayne), the professor Gary (Damian Lewis), a car salesman named Pete (Timothy Olyphant), and the meanderer Beaver (Jason Lee).
Through a series of flashbacks, the audience learns that the friends share a psychic bond and ability to sense things resulting from a gift bestowed upon them by a disabled boy named Douglas who holds a secret.
In the midst of a heavy snowstorm, Beaver and Gary come across a lost man and take him into their cabin to warm him. The man appears to be ill, but is very grateful for the kindness shown to him. Naturally for a film based on a book by Stephen King, things are not what they seem. Before the four friends know what hit them, an alien parasite is spreading and unleashing hostile organisms whose leader is bent on destroying the world.
Of course the military is not going to allow this, and they have sent Colonel Abraham Kurtz (Morgan Freeman), and his alien-busting unit to clean house. It seems that nearly twenty five years of hunting aliens has driven the Colonel to the edge and he plans to eradicate the menace by killing any potential infected people to the chagrin of his second in command Captain Underhill (Tom Sizemore) who states that many of them have a chance for survival.
One would think that with this setup, there would have been some intense action, dazzling FX, and some thrills and chills. Sadly, there is none of the above as “Dreamcatcher” is an absolute mess. The character development is non-existent and Sizemore and Freeman look as if they would rather be anywhere but in this film. The dialogue given to some of the cast is so bad; that it gained the loudest groans I have ever heard from an audience in all of my years as a critic. Combine this with numerous plot holes and non-sequiters and you have a recipe for disaster. One would think that a quality director like Lawrence Kasdan and William Goldman adapting a good Stephen King story would have produced a much better film. Instead we are left with a movie that is so bad and lacking any saving graces, it should have been left buried in the snow.
1 star out of 5
