Review: 'Splice' scientists cook up DNA monster

Science fiction. Starring Sarah Polley and Adrien Brody. Directed by Vincenzo Natali. (R. 110 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)
It's easy enough to stick with "Splice" for about half of the way. It stars Sarah Polley and Adrien Brody as a team of genetic engineers - you know, like Dr. Frankenstein - and something in their personal dynamic is arresting. Subtly but unmistakably, she is the stronger partner, the one truly gifted and the one most likely to turn out to be off her rocker.



"Splice" capitalizes on Polley's forceful personality, her intelligence and her prickliness, qualities already in evidence when she was a teenager. From her earliest days onscreen, Polley has definitely had something, but she's had precious few chances to show it. This movie doesn't even qualify as a real chance, because it eventually caves in on itself. But at least Polley makes out better than Oscar winner Brody, who spends his time here acting weak and dumbfounded.

Director Vincenzo Natali, who co-wrote the screenplay, was apparently intent on offering "Splice" as a moral investigation into the issue of genetic engineering. Yet, for all its surface seriousness, "Splice" is a regulation monster movie. So however somber it gets, it's never truly thought-provoking, and however outrageous it gets, it's still always 20 minutes behind the audience. It's just too dumb to be serious and too slow to be entertaining.

It does, however, manage to be disgusting, which could have been interesting in a creepy sort of way had the movie wed the ugliness to an overall mood. Here it's just gross: The ambitious doctors create the first genetically concocted life-forms, two blobs the size of badgers. Then Elsa (Polley) gets more ambitious. She takes the blob DNA and combines it with ... human DNA. And the result is some horrible thing that starts out looking like a chicken with a baby's head and then grows into some terrifying bald girl (Delphine Chaneac) with pretty eyes and ghastly birdlike legs.

From here, we more or less know where "Splice" is going, which means that the filmmaker had only two sensible options: He could do the obvious but do it immediately, so as to arrive at some fascinating aftermath the audience doesn't expect. Or he could upend audience expectation and take the story in a complete other direction.

Alas, he does neither. Instead, he over-invests in the story of Elsa and Clive (Brody) and tries to make us care about the psychological dynamic between them and this monster-girl they've created. The strategy fails, as Elsa becomes repellent and Clive becomes, first, a cipher and ultimately, an amazing idiot.

The cave-in becomes complete at the point that we understand why Clive is such a washout - if the filmmaker made him any stronger, Clive would be able to advance the action, but this filmmaker has nowhere for the action to go. He has no new idea.

To his credit, director Natali does include two of the most disgusting sex scenes this side of David Cronenberg, and that's something. But poor Sarah Polley. I thought it couldn't get worse than having sex with the monster in "Beowulf & Grendel," but apparently it can get worse, much worse. Funny how some perfectly nice women just have awful luck with men.
Advisory: This film contains sexual situations, gruesome sights and violence.