“Shutter Island” leaves audiences stranded

Shutter Island

Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Michelle Williams

Director: Martin… Shutter Island

Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Michelle Williams

Director: Martin Scorcese

Paramount Pictures

Grade: B-

Watching “Shutter Island” is like eating an amazing five-course meal, with a buttery sirloin steak, an aged red wine and raspberry-sprinkled cheesecake for dessert. But after licking your lips and rubbing your full stomach, you pull out a long, gray hair from the bottom of your plate — and you’re a brunette.

That little hair at the end of a perfect evening can break a masterpiece, just as the final 20 minutes of “Shutter Island” are unsatisfactory, unfulfilling and ultimately damaging to the film.

The film follows Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) as he investigates a missing persons case in an insane asylum housed on Shutter Island, a spooky and foggy series of cliffs and woods in Boston Harbor.

There’s a big twist in Scorsese’s first feature film since 2008’s Rolling Stone documentary, “Shine a Light.” It’s fairly apparent that the twist is coming a little less than halfway in, but maybe I’ve just seen too many movies.

The film can go in two directions, and I personally believe it took the wrong one.

Don’t be scared away, though. “Shutter Island” is a beautiful, exciting film. The cinematography is reminiscent of Scorsese’s work in introspective, soul-searching films like “Taxi Driver” and “Raging Bull.”

Shutter Island also completely solidifies DiCaprio as Scorsese’s new DeNiro. His performance is troublingly addictive — it’s impossible to get bored watching him.

Running at 138 minutes, the film moves surprisingly quickly — except for its dragged-out twist of an ending. There’s suspense, there’s craziness, there’s weird sh*t going on — “Shutter Island” plays out exactly as it should for the majority of the film.

Of course there are plenty of things in the movie that are laughable, like the one-note musical score that attempts to draw suspense out of nothing, or the on-and-off Boston accents of Daniels and his partner Chuck (Mark Ruffalo). Even the dream (or hallucination) sequences involving Daniels’ wife Dolores (Michelle Williams) scoot to the verge of ridiculousness.

“Just don’t look at ‘Shutter Island’ too closely,” people might say. That’s the problem, though: For the whole film you’re looking at it so carefully trying to figure out every part of the mystery — just like Daniels.

It’s such a shame, though. If only that 10-minute-too-long, overly-apparent-throughout-the-whole-film, self-defeating, purposeless, gray hair of an ending had never fallen from Scorsese’s head, perhaps I’d be heading back to the theater to watch “Shutter Island” again tonight.