I am mad at all of you. How could you not tell me that Odd Thomas is a good movie!?! Are you telling me that none of you watched it?!? Because if one of you watched it, then failed me by not passing on this crucial information, are we even friends? Maybe you did not like it because you read the Dean Koonz book that it was based on. Well movies are never as good as books! Grow up! After I saw the movie, I read the reviews, and it was generally despised for that reason. Movies cannot do what books do, and vice versa, which is why I tend to avoid watching a movie based on a recently read book as if it was a Presidon’t supporter.
Odd Thomas stars Anton gone too soon Yelchin as the titular character, a man who inherited supernatural abilities from his mother and decides to use them to help people, dead or living. Imagine if Buffy was an adult and lived in The WB later The CW (never the Netflix) version of Gilmore Girls’ Stars Hollow, but instead of a mother and daughter at the center of a snappy screwball dramedy, it is Odd and his girlfriend along with his waitress coworker, the police chief and his extremely understanding wife. Basically it is a murder mystery with supernatural elements and sometimes before the murder occurs.
I really enjoyed that we did not have to slog through a huge origin story to learn about Odd Thomas, his abilities and this world. The movie provides a little background then shows us a moment in an average day for him before seamlessly raising the stakes. The filmmakers expect that we are smart enough to pick everything up on the run instead of spoon feeding us like babies. Then when all of the elements culminate in the denouement, we may understand what is going on even if we do not want to completely believe it. It is definitely obvious in retrospect after you accept it. I also love that the film uses dialogue and chooses not to show a scene that would have been boring to watch such as having him call different places to ask about uniforms. If there are moments that feel like dangling threads, those storylines are later resolved quickly.
Odd Thomas paints a supernatural world that is not hacky or familiar, but still understandable. It is also rooted in quotidian horrors. The big bad and minor villains kill women and are planning a mass shooting. They may or may not be doing it for supernatural reasons, but the titular character uses supernatural abilities to solve it. In descriptions, he is called a psychic, but my outsider view of a psychic does not encompass the talents that he has although I do think that it includes psychic powers. If he is a simple psychic, then the movie does a great of expanding the traditional view of what a psychic can do then depicting it. I actually guessed who the big bad was fairly early, but I was briefly thrown off the scent because the filmmakers are not minorites, but I was right.
Visually Odd Thomas is edited expertly. It uses a lot of transitional wipes to jump between different time periods. Occasionally you will see a building slam down into the existing frame before the rest of the next scene abruptly gets filled in. The filmmakers never use the same trick twice. If variety is the spice of life, then this film is teeming with life. Another time, it shows a flashback repeatedly—the way that it looks for a normal person and what Odd sees is really unfolding. The distinct visual style of this film makes it feel dynamic and is as fresh and snappy as its dialogue.
I enjoyed the action because Odd Thomas could handle himself, but he also felt vulnerable, not as if he could do anything. Even though he was a protagonist, I genuinely thought that he could die at any moment. The story felt like the series finale of a long running series, and it possibly may not get renewed. Also when one of the rules that we think govern his world get tossed, it really made me realize that anything could happen, including the death of the protagonist. One reviewer seemed to completely dismiss that as a possibility, and good for him, but as someone who was watching the movie completely unaware of the film’s literary origins, I genuinely considered it a possibility.
I actually liked the other characters, including the ones that we never see. Odd Thomas has a downstairs neighbor Rosalia, and just Yelchin’s occasional verbal reassurances that he is the cause of all the noise and the person taking her car was hilarious as her light goes on and off depending on her level of alarm. Thanks to Yelchin’s delivery, good editing and expert dialogue timing, an unseen character is more endearing that the average person in films. Even though I liked Stormy, his girlfriend, the one point that strained my suspension of disbelief was that he worked with Gugu Mbatha-Raw, the star of Belle, Beyond the Lights and Fast Color, and lead supporting star in Motherless Brooklyn and the mother in Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time, and she was not his girlfriend. Willem Dafoe plays the police chief, which just made the long running gag of his interrupted free time more hilarious. Patton Oswalt also has a brief, but memorable and pivotal cameo. Arnold Vosloo, The Mummy from the Brendan Fraser version, has a brief cameo.
Speaking of Fraser’s The Mummy, Odd Thomas has the same director, Stephen Sommers, who also wrote the screenplay. I enjoyed his version of The Mummy and The Mummy Returns, but he lost me with Van Helsing. I did not realize that he also directed GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra, which I thought was dreckitude so maybe if you told me that Odd Thomas was a good film, I would not have believed you because of this string of disasters. Odd Thomas is Sommers’ last feature film, which is unfortunate because it seems as if he finally got his groove back, but he lost too much good will to get a fair shake from the establishment and appears to have left filmmaking entirely.
Odd Thomas is a solidly entertaining film. If life was fair, we would have gotten a sequel or a television series on the CW, but it is not, and we do not even have Yelchin. If you are not into supernatural mysteries, then definitely skip it. Also if you are not into postmodern editing styles or find them confusing, skip it. If you already read the books, you apparently will not enjoy it so skip it. For the rest of you, definitely check it out. There are some gross out scenes, but it is fairly tame. There is no nudity or cursing. I am probably not going to read the books because there are quite a few, and I did not finish the last series that I started.