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S. Darko (2009)

DVD Cover (Twentieth Century Fox)
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Overall Rating 36%
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Ranked #4,347
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Connections: Donnie Darko

Donnie Darko's little sister Samantha and her best friend Corey are on a cross-country road trip, but soon find themselves entangled in a dangerous glitch in the time-space continuum. --IMDb
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Review by Ginose
Added: May 20, 2009
Holy shit, if there's one thing I can't stand it's a quick cash-in on what WAS a really good, original movie.

I mean, we've all seen quite a few of these, but most of them a straight to DVD sequels that choose to completely distance themselves from the original's plot, characters and settings (holy shit, they made a "White Noise 2"!?) and this sometimes works... SOMETIMES works... rare as it is, these can be decent movies in one respect and do nothing to take anything from what the original was going for. I love when that happens, so I do wonder who EVER had the theory that making a straight to DVD movie based ON characters from the source-material (holy shit, they made a "Starship Troopers 3"!?), running them through the same scenarios for... different reasons of some kind.

Thus we enter "s. Darko", a movie pretentious enough to ACTUALLY subtitle itself "A Donnie Darko Tale"... God, I hope that's not an implication that they want to make more of these things.

We enter with a long, boring scrolling intro telling us that t he Darko household fell apart after the death of their eldest son, Donnie; so broken, that the remaining daughter, Samantha, can no longer take her home life and takes off on a hippie road-trip with her friend, heading to her father's club to become dancers. Yeah, well, after some car trouble they wind up in a small, off-road town, beginning to mingle with the townspeople, coming to understand them all the better. All the while a strange meteor destroys a local windmill where a crazy Gulf-war vet had been squatting... well, after a few disjointed sequences that... somewhat cover the time-travel principles of the first film, we discover that the world will soon end, and that only Samantha can stop it.

Yeah, if that plot-description sounded hollow and uninspired then that's because the plot is just that. I'm not sure what to say, really... if you're a fan of "Donnie Darko" then you'll undoubtedly hate this film; it truly treads no ground that the first one didn't and even goes so far as to recycle the general plot of the first, only with far less spirit and creativity. We go through the same motions as before, covering the same principles only THIS TIME a lot of the things that happen don't make any sense at all, almost as if the principles behind the time-travel and forced destiny were completely lost on the writer(s) and he / she / whofuckingcares mistook it for some shitty little angst movie that had a creepy bunny (like so many people seemed to).

Gone are the carefully written plot-points that all intertwine to amount to a revelation of the main character, identifying the greater good in his actions. Gone is the insightful ending that can only truly be understood after recognizing how each piece fits into the grand working. Gone are the mysteries riddling the plot... hell, gone are the well-assembled performances, A-list casting and wonderful art-direction.

What we are left with here, people, is a pretender, a fan script that got too much cover and missed the point by a landslide. Now, even in this, it's hard to call any true merits to the final product other than a handful of special effects and a few cute little homage to man greater films... this was a wreck, a sham, a waste of my time in both viewing and reviewing, a waste of my money in the purchase and a waste of your time if you bothered with it either.

I'm appalled to say that, not only was this film much worse than I thought it would be, but it was actually worse than "Southland Tales".

1.6/10.
bluemeanie #1: bluemeanie - added May 22, 2009 at 2:34pm
Can be summed up in one word: Why? 0/10.
Crispy #2: Crispy - added May 22, 2009 at 3:37pm
Answered in one word: Money.
Greg Follender #3: Greg Follender - added May 22, 2009 at 5:48pm
When I originally saw the promo for this... I actually laughed because I thought it was a fan-film.

Now... for some reason... it's just not that funny anymore.
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