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Zone's Eye View of "Dragonfly" 

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Synopsis of movie:

When someone you love dies, are they gone forever? As head of emergency services for Chicago Memorial Hospital, Dr. Joe Darrow (Costner) is a respected expert in trauma and triage. But his professional knowledge provides little comfort when tragedy claims the life of his wife. A doctor herself, Emily Darrow (Thompson) was on a medical mercy mission when she died in a bus accident on a remote mountain road in Venezuela. Reminders of Emily are everywhere, among them images of dragonflies, her personal totem because of a birthmark on her shoulder. And then there are Emily’s former patients in the pediatric oncology ward. Joe promised to look in on them when Emily left for Venezuela, and now finds that they offer a surprising link to her. To the kids, Darrow is not a burned-out E.R. doc, but rather ‘Emily’s Joe.’ And as some of these young patients survive near-death experiences, Joe begins to believe that Emily is trying to communicate with him – from the other side. While Joe’s co-workers and friends worry about his mental stability, Joe comes to realize that he must draw on faith – rather than fact – for answers to his questions.

Now for The Zone's Eye View

By Laura Alber

Dragonfly unfortunately didn’t bring the suspense level I had hoped for. It was at best a mediocre attempt at a life after death/ghost story. The movie tended to jump around quite a bit, from the children in a cancer ward who have seen Joe’s (Kevin Costner) wife and try to relay fragments of messages, along with their strange drawings, to a “few” haunting scenes at Joe’s actual house. It has only hints of the spirituality aspect, and even then the script doesn’t allow it to be believable, or give you time to make a determination one way or the other if you believe there could be life after death.

All we really have to go on as far as his wife is concerned is given to us in a very minimal number of flashbacks. His own character is never really developed, other than we know he is a distraught man, and a now workaholic doctor verging on driving himself over the edge. He has a few friends, but we never know them long enough to even remember their names, other than his neighbor, played by Kathy Bates. She’s the only one to actually bring any “life” to the movie at all.

It seems that Joe’s wife, Emily (Susanna Thompson-“Once and Again”) is a doctor in the children’s oncology ward of the hospital that Joe also works in. Pregnant and dedicated to her work, she agrees to a Venezuelan mission to help the children in need there, much to Costner’s reluctance. She is caught in a terrible storm on a bus full of children when they come upon a mudslide, which washes the bus over a huge cliff. Her body wasn’t found with the others, and that’s pretty much all we know until Joe starts hearing things from the children, and continually sees dragonfly’s everywhere (her “totem” as he called it). He began to wonder, since some of the children were only in comas when they saw and talked to her, then maybe she wasn’t really dead after all. About to lose his mind and his job, he finally decides to travel to the isolated and restricted village the children kept describing and said, “Emily wants you to go to the rainbow”.

There is a good but a little predicable ending, the rest of the story is mechanical. Costner once again seems to have no other expression than his overused “deep in thought” look, which is getting very old. Actually, his acting lately in general is lacking in any substance whatsoever. He is a one-dimensional actor trying to take on different characters, but they all come across the exact same way regardless. The better acting came from co-stars, Kathy Bates and Susanna Thompson. Both gave wonderful and emotional performances considering the script they had to work with.

The script was lacking, the characterization was terrible, Costner was a very bad choice as far as the starring role, I think the only things that did make this film worthwhile were the scenery shots, and the visualizations of his wife Emily. This could have been a great movie had it been better thought out, and written in a way where everything didn’t focus on “Kevin Costner Stars In…” rather they should have written the script as if Joe Schmo was playing the lead. Maybe then, we could have had a little more substance and “thrilling moments” as we would expect from a film that calls itself a “thriller”.

The Zone rates Dragonfly a 4 out of 10, and would highly suggest any director to re-consider Costner for any more films where he should actually show “emotions”.