RG
Roberto Giacomelli
•Sam Darko, Donnie's sister, was particularly shaken by her brother's death. Seven years have passed since then, but for Sam, life has never truly changed: her dream of becoming a dancer has faded, her family neglects her, and the only thing she has left is to take refuge in fantasy, despite her inability to dream. Sam is now on a trip with her best friend Corey, heading to Los Angeles. Their car, however, has a breakdown, and the two are trapped in a small town waiting for a replacement part to fix the vehicle. Here, there is an eerie air of rarefaction in which strange characters move, including Iraq Jack, a Gulf War veteran now gone mad, opposed by the entire community and eager to travel through time. The sudden fall of a meteorite that nearly kills Iraq Jack is only the beginning of a series of strange events that trigger incomprehensible temporal paradoxes and always involve Sam.
When a film is produced solely for the home video market and in Italy it manages to be placed among the cinema releases (with a big publicity campaign, by the way), there is reason to suspect the real quality of the work. If, in addition, the film in question is also the sequel to a generational cult practically unserializable, then that suspicion begins to become a blind certainty. And indeed, independently of prejudices and expectations of any kind, "S. Darko" succeeds in the goal of revealing itself to be the mediocre and useless film that everyone expected.
After all, how can one continue an eccentric, complex, and self-contained story like the one told in "Donnie Darko" without falling into repetition and gratuitous complexity or simplification? A practically suicidal mission, an operation as commercial in form as anti-commercial in substance that would probably have only succeeded in the skillful hands of an abstract superior entity uncontaminated by human influence, a status to which the mortals Chris Fisher and Nathan Atkins, respectively director and screenwriter of "S. Darko", obviously do not belong.
The goal of this film is to remain faithful to the mythology created by Richard Kelly in the first episode, in part by reproposing it, but expanding the horizons to a broader story and multiple keys of interpretation. The goal, however, has not been achieved, and the greatest fault can be attributed to the figurative and narrative links with the previous story, sometimes too gratuitous and poorly integrated. In practice, it is the lack of imaginative freedom that resides in the plot that places the first limits that anchor "S. Darko" to its failure. The clumsy choice to reintroduce key objects and events from "Donnie Darko" to shout the link between the two films makes a frayed and sometimes truly incongruous work created, making the presence of Roberta Sparrow's book, the wormholes, Frank's mask, religious fanaticism, and the imminent apocalypse useless ornaments of forced continuity placed where the story could have otherwise stood. In practice, imagine the screenwriter who, rightly, meticulously combs through the script of "Donnie Darko", extracts the distinctive elements, and inserts them poorly into a story that wants to be, however, original. The result is a kind of Frankenstein monster that leaves perplexed and even bored, since the inexplicably lysergic rhythm of the film contributes to digging it a pit of absolute mediocrity.
Surely praiseworthy is the desire - a bit timid in reality - to build something that can also be original. The time travel and the structure of tangent universes are this time more complicated, amplified, making different temporal planes succeed and overlap, all marked by death and rebirth in anticipation of the final catastrophe. The story becomes more choral, and the central character of Sam is more than once eclipsed by the presence of the supporting characters. Here, it does not seem to exist a true fixed point, there is not "the" Donnie, but the mask of ambiguous strangeness is passed from face to face, as is that of the spirit guide, thus extinguishing the iconic force of many of the elements of the previous film (the rabbit, the wormholes, the sacrificial victim, the hero). At the same time, the character of Sam is also an element of ambiguous interest that could certainly be seen as the author of each event, at whatever dimensional level one wants to refer, appearing thus as a unique cardinal point in the life of those with whom she interacts, influencing time and space: it is as if it were Sam herself who creates the bridge of tangency between different universes and moves the pieces of the entire game, a kind of amplified ability compared to that of her brother that stems from her imagination. It is no coincidence that everything begins and ends with her arrival and departure, almost as if to symbolize that the world outside her Ego does not exist.
The countdown to the end is here less obsessive, and strangely the imminent apocalypse is experienced by the characters and the viewer with greater passivity, but this state of impending passivity, surely wanted in part, weighs on the entire film, influencing viewer engagement. The characters that populate the film do not seem particularly interesting, all barely sketched and some at times too caricatured, starting with the bully with a heart of gold clone of Corey Feldman (the Ed Westwick of "Gossip Girl") and the slimy nerd passionate about meteorites (Jackson Rathbone fresh out of "Twilight").
Curiously, Daveigh Chase, who plays Sam, is the same actress who played Donnie's little sister in the first film, in addition to being the face of Samara in "The Ring".
Only to be seen to have the confirmation that "Donnie Darko" did not need a sequel.
