Wicker Park is an ineffectual mess of pretty people acting stupid

I must’ve done something to anger the movie gods, and now they’re raking me through the coals. Three weeks after Shaun of the Dead didn’t make it to our theater, and one week after we missed out on Friday Night Lights, many movie buffs, yours truly included, were really looking forward to watching Team America, the comedy from the creators of South Park. No such luck. What treat can we feast our eyes on instead? Wicker Park. I know; you can hardly contain your enthusiasm.

Before I detail why Wicker Park, the “psychological thriller” starring teen heartthrob Josh Hartnett, is not worth your time or money, let me give you a little context to help understand what it’s doing here. Wicker Park opened in American theaters on Sep 3. It debuted at No. 6 on the box office chart, pulling in $6.8 million in its first weekend. In its second weekend, it took a nosedive, dropping down to $2.5 million. Does money have anything to do with the quality of a movie? Well, yes.

Opening weekends aren’t much of a reflection of how good a movie is, because they can be so heavily influenced by advertising. The number to pay attention to is how much of a drop it takes in its second weekend, because by then, word-of-mouth has spread, and people are more likely to be influenced by their friends than by an advertisement or an egotistical schmuck masquerading as a film critic. Most movies drop about 50 percent. A good movie might only drop 40 percent.

In weeks 2-4, respectively, Wicker Park dropped 63 percent, 60 percent and 75 percent. By its 5th weekend, Wicker Park had fallen completely off the face of the Earth, not even ranking in the box office top 50. Even Catwoman is still in the top 50, and it’s been in theaters more than twice as long. What’s a theater exec to do when they realize they’ve lost money on an investment? Send it to Saipan to see if they can eek a few more pennies out of it. So much for the business lesson. Let’s get on to the movie.

What would happen if a stalker stalked a stalker? And then, what if the stalker being stalked decided to stalk the stalker stalking him? Hmmm…let’s make a movie about it. That’s what the producers of Wicker Park must’ve been thinking, and what they’ve created is like watching a dog chase its own tail.

Wicker Park could’ve been interesting, and I imagine the French film it was based on, L’Appartement, probably is. When an investment banker (Hartnett) catches a fleeting glimpse of a woman he believes to be his ex-girlfriend, he ditches his job and current girlfriend to obsessively search for the woman who left him two years ago. The situation initially takes on the appearance of a simple story of a stubborn, dumped lover, fixated on the woman he can’t have. It takes a turn towards the Twilight Zone, however, when he meets another woman, who shares the same name as his ex, wears the same perfume, the same shoes, and lives in the same apartment, which she hasn’t even bothered to redecorate, for some reason, since moving in. Bit by bit, a game of deception is revealed, opening up a crazy love triangle. Except, there’s more than three people involved, so maybe it’s a love rhombus, or a love parallelogram. Hold up, there’s five people involved, now that I think about it. Love pentagon.

As I watched Wicker Park, I was hoping for a big payoff. Maybe we’d at least have some fun when all the points of the love polygon ended up in the same room. The eventual climax was a big letdown, unfortunately. Zach Morris did it much better in Saved by the Bell.

Technically speaking, the timeline in Wicker Park is linear, but since there are so many flashbacks, it has a very non-linear feel. Lucky for us, every time the narrative moves in or out of a flashback, we hear a weird sound effect, “vvshhswwck”, just so that we won’t get confused.

The acting is all-around piss poor. Josh Hartnett (Hollywood Homicide, Pearl Harbor) is good at making 13 year old girls scream, but his acting abilities are suspect. Costars Rose Byrne (the homely girl in Troy) and Diane Kruger (the hot chick in Troy) aren’t terrible, but Kruger is pretty much just asked to stand around and look cute. As the best buddy, Matthew Lillard (Scooby Doo, Scream) shows that his range as an actor is pretty much limited to playing psycho killers and doing impeccable impersonations of Casey Kasem. Rooby, Rooby Roo!

Wicker Park could actually make a fun drinking game. Shoot a round of Cuervo every time the destined lovers come amazingly close to being reunited, just to have their reunification foiled by a noisy distraction, or a key dropped in a storm drain, or a shoelace that needs to be tied, or anything else that will make the audience go “Doh!” ‘Nuf said. Wicker Park stinks. If you’re in a movie mood, your local video store, for the time being, is more deserving of your money.