Communication-from-beyond-the-grave chiller. Kevin Costner loses his wife in a Venezuelan bus mishap, searches the river in vain for her body, attends her memorial service, and performs a C-section that same day on a deceased mother in the ER, all before the end of the opening credits. A total nonbeliever ("When you never wake up again," he counsels a would-be suicide, "don't say I didn't warn you"), he nonetheless starts to doubt his own mind, even his sanity, when a series of funny happenings (funny-strange, not funny-haha) suggests his wife is trying to get in touch with him. Director Tom Shadyac, far removed from Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and The Nutty Professor, seems intent to demonstrate that Patch Adams revealed his true self: a pig for mush. (Even visually, the movie has something of the pigpen about it: the muddy dullness.) Costner, meanwhile, gets to add another portrait to his gallery of droopy, doleful heroes. (Not that he hadn't already done a withdrawn widower: Message in a Bottle.) His perpetual boyishness -- the cracking voice, the evasive gaze, the aw-shucks awkwardness -- transforms the effect, though, into an unattractive and overdramatic case of the sulks, such that the Costner oeuvre emerges as one of the most reliable remedies yet discovered for sufferers from self-pity. Just pop a Costner tape into the VCR and embarrass them into bucking up. Kathy Bates, Linda Hunt, Joe Morton, Ron Rifkin. (2002) — Duncan Shepherd
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