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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Actors’ Talent Wasted In Predictable Movie

Jay Carr The Boston Globe

“Hideaway” should be hidden away - and probably soon will be. It wastes the classy presences of Christine Lahti and Jeff Goldblum as a couple who collide with supernatural evil equipped with upto-the-minute computer wizardry.

But its psychedelic tunnels suggest outtakes from ” A Space Odyssey,” and its plot machinery wouldn’t make an “Omen” sequel.

Goldblum has most of the action as a father who still hasn’t got over the death of his young daughter and who briefly passes over to the other side in a car crash, but who’s brought back. Naturally, he’s not quite the same.

He freaks out when he starts seeing horrific visions and really goes into orbit when he realizes he’s seeing through the eyes of a psychotic killer just before the latter slashes the throats of his nubile victims. Worse, it’s two-way vision. The killer can see things through his eyes. They’re not hallucinations, as everyone, including him, thinks.

What’s happened is that he’s got his own little psychic-friends network with the killer, a devil worshipper who also was brought back from the

dead and whose creepy imperatives and sculpture garden in the bowels of an abandoned amusement park represent the dark side of interactivity.

The stakes go up when the killer targets Lahti’s and Goldblum’s surviving daughter, teenager Alicia Silverstone. There are lots of shocktheater cuts and lots of gushing blood from young women’s throats, and a showdown between dueling morphed blobs (blue is good, red is evil, if you were wondering).

The stale and utterly predictable “Hideaway” is odd in that it combines grade-Z story elements with grade-A production values and glossy professionalism. Goldblum manages to shade his character’s dumb perplexity with surprising washes of delicacy, and Lahti, a tower of strength even with material as worthless as this, sidesteps cliched hand-wringing by getting in on the action at the end.

The British Columbia locations help, including a network of tunnels in an abandoned copper mine. But “Hideaway” plays like the product of a grant to develop artificial stupidity.

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