Come to Daddy

My dad only did Christmas shopping for my mother. All the shopping for me was done by her. But one year, in my teen years, that changed. I remember it because, as I was opening the present, he was quite excited to see my reaction. He said proudly how he saw it in Suncoast and picked it out himself. It was a VHS and CD combo pack of Rage Against The Machine. He knew the kind of music I listened to -- alternative/grunge and metal -- so he figured this was a lay-up. His excitement turned to disappointment when I told him that, while I appreciated the gesture, I was not a fan of RATM. I hated to dash his joy like that, but I couldn't lie either. That's kind of how I feel about Come To Daddy. It wants to please so hard, and I wish I could say I liked it as much as it wants me to like it, but I don't. The main elements of the movie are great, which is why I can go as high on the score as 2 1/2 stars. Elijah Wood is excellent, and Martin Donovan (an underrated and overlooked actor, in my opinion) is equally magnificent. The cinematography is wonderful, using both the interior of the weird, UFO-shaped house, and the majestic, coastal exteriors around the house. When the movie flips at the halfway point and the violence comes in, they are gritty and ugly and excellently done, I believe with practical effects as well. And there is some ludicrous and enjoyable gallows humor sprinkled throughout. But the movie is trying to be too many things, and it never achieves any of them as much as it wants to. The first half of this movie is a family drama, pitting a man against his estranged father, and it just goes on and on and on. That first half is devoid of the gallows humor of the second half, or the action, or the horror. It's just this long, drawn-out, tedious melodrama that doesn't set any sense of tone or atmosphere for the second half. It only sets up plot points, and in such a long, labored manner that, by the time it gets to that second half, any goodwill or momentum or, well, anything positive this movie might've had is gone. It has tried patience by fragging its feet for far too long. And even if that first half wasn't so labored, the second half is never as scary, never as intense (except the finger dislocating scene), and never as darkly funny as it wants to be. You can feel the movie trying, and God bless it for doing so, but there is just something missing here. The humor feels more inappropriately silly than dark, and the scares are just action sequences. Everything about this movie is a half-measure, but not because of laziness or ineptitude. It's a hard-fought half-measure, and I appreciate it for trying, especially Elijah Wood, who keeps making these offbeat horror movies. His genuine love for the genre is admirable, and I appreciate him bringing new projects and angles to it. But at the end of the day, when you watch a movie, it's not effort that's on the screen, it's the outcome of that effort. The outcome of Come To Daddy just isn't enough bridge this movie's gaps.