The Fourth Kind ( 2009 )

Starring: Milla Jovovich, Will Patton, Hakeem Kae-Kazim, & Corey Johnson

Directed By Olatunde Osunsanmi

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1220198/


As movie-selling gimmicks go, "The Fourth Kind" has a fairly good one.

Let's see if we can explain this. The film opens as star Milla Jovovich walks up to the camera, introduces herself as "actress Milla Jovovich" and tells us we're about to watch a docudrama about a real alien-abduction researcher named Dr. Abigail Tyler.

Jovovich then spends the rest of the movie as Tyler, a woman who comes to believe that aliens are terrorizing Nome, Alaska, residents, including her. Among the skeptics is the county sheriff, played by Will Patton, who gives the same furious ham-and-cheese performance he rocked in "The Postman."

This supposed re-enactment is intercut with supposed "actual interviews" and "archived audio," recorded by the supposedly real Dr. Tyler. There's even an "actual" video Q&A with Tyler, supposedly recorded years after the Alaskan events. The poor doctor is as pale as an actor slathered in makeup and speaks in a traumatized monotone that might be mistaken for an on-the-nose line reading if it weren't, you know, "real."

Anyhoo. Get past the distracting "is it or isn't it?" nonsense, and "Fourth Kind" has its moments.

There are some slightly unnerving shots of owls and a couple of hypnotic-regression sessions gone bone-snappingly wrong. I like very much that writer/director Olatunde Osunsanmi has no intention of giving us a clear look at his alien menace. He also has some meta fun with a few split-screen shots that contrast his "documentary" and "re-enacted" footage.

Unfortunately, the story finally gets too silly to believe, even if you Want to Believe. There's too much unnecessary psychologically muddled stuff involving the death of Tyler's husband, plus some final-act foolishness that's basically the equivalent of a doctor who treats broken necks by asking someone to break her neck so she can better understand the injury.

The movie's carnival-barker hard sell is that it's after The Truth. It's really after an opening-weekend gross, of course. It's sporadically clever and chilling, but I'll be shocked if it endures as a "Blair Witch"-style horror vérité phenomenon.

Overall Rating ( * * * )

Mr. What?