Everything that the ultra-low budget did right, The Fourth Kind gets wrong. The mawkish, amateurish Paranormal Activity felt more real by doing very little, but timing it well and giving us characters we could care about – even if they weren’t the brightest bulbs on the chandelier.
The Fourth Kind purports to be a combination of genuine archival footage and re-enactments of the events that ruined Alaskan psychologist Dr. Abigail Tyler’s life and stole her daughter. It’s not spoiling anything to say that these events involve alien abductions. In the “re-enactments,” Tyler is played by Milla Jovovich and, from the start, she shows little in the way of nuance. She’s either almost whispering, or wailing. She’s shown a much wider range in the mediocre, but entertaining Resident Evil films than she shows here.
The archival footage consists of an interview with the “real” Dr. Tyler, conducted by Olatunde Osunsanmi [the film’s director and writer] – interspersed with videos of Tyler’s sessions with some of her patients juxtaposed with the re-enactments.
The Fourth Kind begins with Tyler in session with a patient and ends with the kind of placard type ending that explains where everyone is now. In between, it’s a mish-mash of archive and re-enactment in about a fifty split. It’s a good idea that is undone by laughable dialogue and poor performances from able character actors like Will Patton [as a hysterically overwrought sheriff] and Elias Koteas [Tyler’s psychotherapist].
There are a couple of solid jump moments, but they are overwhelmed by silliness of the plot [one is even spoiled on the poster!] – a plot that fails to build any genuine suspense – though heaven knows the score tries hard enough. If everything about the film wasn’t so blatant, so over-cranked and so populated by idiots, it might well have worked. It’s so cynical in its execution that it doesn’t even fail gloriously.
It sets out to do what a film like Paranormal Activity does – only with a significantly larger budget and far, far less imagination. Ed Wood couldn’t have done much worse.
Final Grade: F
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