The Marquette Tribune

Radcliffe unable to work magic in new ghost thriller

The Harry Potter series has finally reached its unfortunate — and extremely profitable — end. For the young actors and actresses who we watched grow up literally before our very eyes, it is now time to start finding new roles to separate themselves from the characters we all know and love.

Emma Watson took a small step with her supporting role in “My Week with Marilyn,” but Harry Potter – I mean Daniel Radcliffe – outdoes her by taking the lead in “The Woman in Black,” a old-school ghost story with cobwebs and creaking doors aplenty. While it’s a wise move by Radcliffe, it ends up being a regrettable decision for the film as a whole.

Radcliffe plays Arthur Kipps, a young lawyer struggling to keep his job after his wife dies and leaves him with their little boy to raise on his own. He gets one last shot to keep his job: He must go to a creepy, fog-filled village to wrap up the paperwork on a woman’s recent death. It seems like a simple job, but things get complicated when a sinister specter keeps appearing in town, causing death and loud music cues.

After seeing the ghost several times, Kipps decides it’s up to him to find out how to destroy the ghoul. If only he had remembered his wizard training.

Unfortunately, the film that results is a rather predictable horror story. Screenwriter Jane Goldman, who put some clever twists on the exhausted superhero genre in “Kick-Ass” and “X-Men: First Class,” isn’t able to pull the same trick in “The Woman in Black.” The ghost’s anger stems from some sort of past mistreatment, and something must be found or returned in order for the apparition to be pleased. If you’ve seen “The Ring” or any other ghost tale from the past two decades, the last act will provide very few surprises.

The casting director, however, didn’t help the script out much by selecting Radcliffe as its lead. The young British actor started off very stiff in the early Harry Potter movies, but as they went along, he showed off some surprising skill and depth, and it seemed like the young man might end up having a career after Hogwarts after all.

But this role isn’t for him. To be more particular, it’s a role for someone at least five years older. Emotionally and visually, Radcliffe seems too young to portray a mourning father. Remember at the end of the last Potter film when the three leads attempted to act like parents? Imagine an entire movie like that.

The movie doesn’t linger on Kipps’ family life for long, but even without the backstory, Radcliffe feels like a child in an adult’s movie. His aged overcoat looks too big on the actor, and when he is walking with co-star Ciarán Hinds, he pales in size, appearing more like his son than an equal.

It’s a horror movie, though, so the biggest question is whether or not “The Woman in Black” is scary. The answer is a big resounding sometimes. Director James Watkins builds decent tension and has a couple of creepy payoffs.

But too many of the moments rely on lazy scare tactics, including several cheap jumps accompanied by a banging music cue. It startles the viewer but doesn’t scare.

Where the film does deliver is in the setting and atmosphere. The movie’s palette is limited entirely to colors on the grey spectrum, and it results in a suitably dreary, dread-filled world. Radcliffe’s house, an overgrown mansion filled with cobwebs and creepy dolls – why do children in horror movies always own so many terrifying toys? Couldn’t one haunted house just have an Xbox? – fits perfectly into Watkins’ traditionally spooky universe.

Unfortunately, “The Woman in Black” is forced to rely on the miscast Radcliffe to move the story and be the star. The good news is that it never seems that he is just playing Harry Potter again. The bad news is that he never seems like his actual character either.

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