Movie Review - The Mothman Prophecies

Richard Gere plays a reporter for The Washington Post. He has a wife, a good job and a brand new house. Until his wife is hurt in a car accident very soon after buying their new house. She dies just as quickly for no real reason apart from to isolate him and give him something supernatural to experience late in the movie. The opening 20 minutes has nothing happen apart from the accident and his wife's death, neither of these are truly vital to what little plot there actually is in the film so could have been cut and just referred to in dialogue or short flashbacks.

A lot of the film could quite easily be cut with little on no damage to the viewing experience (there isn't very much to experience anyway, the film is far too long). the film takes itself far too seriously and it's laughable claims of being based on reality are as about as real as The Blair Witch. I could quite easily cut a whole hour from this film and make it far more watchable and still easy to understand.

Gere is not a likable character or at least doesn't play that way for me. I had no sympathy for the loss of his wife (especially it goes she's dead, it's suddenly 2 years later and life's all hunky dory). You need to be able to relate to his loss or feel it. I don't, if they'd spent less time in scenes where hardly anything happens and perhaps shown a bit of what happened in his life during the 2 years where he was coming to terms with losing his wife I might have had a bit more sympathy for him. Anyway he ends up in Point Pleasant, a nicely named town where folks see weird stuff and weird stuff happens. Most of the occurrences are too weird to be based on any kind of reality.

Gere gets sucked into the madness and descends into it himself almost to the point of losing his job and everything that matters to him. The end of the film is it's only redeeming moment with the bridge collapse and even then that is far too over done and takes (surprise, surprise) far too long for the event to take place. This should have been shot really quickly with barely any time to react to the event.

Gere's reaction to dive into the river to try and save the female cop is insane (especially with all the electrical cables hanging into the water, the fast flowing current, how cold the water would be in December). With all the debris falling into the water the likelihood of one or both of them escaping her car and safely reaching the surface was very low indeed. The ending is very weak indeed with them just saying they didn't know why the bridge collapsed and no-one every saw the Mothman again. Very poor indeed.