THE NINTH GATE
Pretty good until the end

  I didn't have very high expectations for The Ninth Gate.  I dunno, maybe I'm just getting jaded, but Satan scares me about as much as any episode of Ally McBeal.  Hey, I don't mind when a movie uses him and uses him well.  It's just that most movies just give us Satan and don't do anything with him; they leave EVERYTHING to the audience, and if the audience isn't already concerned about Satan, well, no dice.  (for the record, the number of really interesting/frightening movie Satans in my lifetime - I'm younger than The Exorcist by a few months - is precisely one.  Okay, maybe there was Angel Heart, but I don't remember.)  And after seeing the ads for this movie, my eyes rolled - Polanski or no Polanski, this looked like End Of Days without the guns.

Fortunately, this movie has almost nothing at all to do with Satan.  No, what we have here is Dean Corso (Johnny Depp), a New York dealer in antique books who isn't above conning a greedy young couple out of their stroke-afflicted pop's priceless four-volume Don Quixote.  He's approached by Boris Balkan (Frank Langella) for a certain assignment - Balkan has in his possession an extremely rare book called The Nine Gates Of The Kingdom Of The Shadows, written by a guy named Torchia, who lived up to his name by being torched in the Inquisition.  You can call up Satan with this book, if you use it right (and he'd BETTER come, considering that he's rumored to be the co-author).  Only three of these books exist, and Balkan believes that one is a forgery, but he doesn't know which.  The other two are in Portugal and France, so Corso is sent overseas to inspect them for himself, where he finds that this assignment is a little more complex and involved than he'd originally been told.

This plays out more like a detective story than a horror movie, and it's a fine detective story.  I was reminded of In The Mouth Of Madness, but here everything plays out much more "conventionally", in the sense that the necessities of a detective plot take precedence over the phantasmagoria of Carpenter's film.  Corso makes an odd-seeming but entirely appropriate hard-boiled investigator, and until the story just kinda vanishes into smoke at the end, his discoveries and encounters are quite engrossing.  And I can't state enough how much I appreciate the fact that nobody blathers on at him about how he's Looking Into Areas Where Man Was Not Meant To Explore - hell, everybody's all to eager to get into the subject here.

I've said before that Depp is a great actor in good roles but useless without them, and here, he surprised me.  The role of Corso isn't written as anything all that special; in other hands, he'd barely be noticeable.  But Depp (with appropriately Mephistophelean facial hair) makes his lines and screen time count; I don't know why he keeps smoking around and drinking red wine directly above these priceless, easily-damaged books, however...

The rest of the cast is more or less disposable but they all do fine work with what they're given.  But it's Langella that really shines - getting the best moment in the movie, too, when he enters a scene that in SO many ways looks lifted right out of Eyes Wide Shut, and beautifully puts to shame the pompous twits whose party he interrupts.

Apparent from the hypnotic opening credits sequence, the cinematography is excellent; this the best-looking horror movie I've seen in years.  Roman Polanski is in high form here; teasing us with exactly the sort of nonsense I was talking about when I said that there's nothing scary about Satan (a The Omen-style freak accident, Satanists in cowled robes, etc.) and then giving us something that maybe we should be concerned about.  One thing this movie was that I wasn't expecting was funny.  There are a number of laughs here, two in particular that had me howling, and it's nice to see a horror movie that can make me laugh that hard for the right reasons.  The script, for most of its length, is sharp and witty (excepting the too-frequent appearances of the numbers 666 and 13), but GRR that cursed ending!

On top of resolving things through some monumentally stupid behavior on behalf on one character, how things are capped off feels like nobody could think of anything more to do, like the writers became simply drained of ideas.  Nobody even mentions what the Ninth Gate leads to, or whatever became of those first eight Gates.  I don't need everything explained for me; hell, I loved Cube.  That was a movie where the unknown didn't matter.  I loved 2001; it was a movie where the unknown is up to interpretation.  Here, the unknown is just that, a what-the-hell absence of purpose, with the books becoming, in the end, nothing more than maguffins that cruelly tease us with promise of being something more thoughtful.  Ah, well.

So, a qualified recommendation for The Ninth Gate.  It coulda and shoulda been more, but it's a pretty entertaining trip, even if the destination is nowhere.

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