The paranoiac thriller Freaks — at least at first — has a wonderfully dark idea: A maniacally intense father (the disheveled Emile Hirsch) is keeping his small daughter (the mostly irritating Lexy Kolker) from going outside of their house, mostly for fear that the world will consider her a “freak” and imprison her inside a mountain compound.
As creepy neighbors — usually armed with melty ice cream cones — prowl around her house, it’s easy to think that Dad might be on to something here. But when her ice cream salesman grandfather (a wizened Bruce Dern) shows up, that’s when we learn the truth about the world — it’s some kind of a cheap superhero thing — and it’s really hard to care about any of it anymore.
The “freaks” tend to bleed from their eyes while displaying very cost-effective powers like super-speed, disappearing and telling people what to do, with a killer task force assigned to keep them under control and imprisoned, even though it’s apparently one officer and a hard-nosed agent (Grace Park).
The film was obviously made to cash in on the crop of recent superhero movies — mostly of the mutant variety — which I can understand, but as long as Marvel and DC are pumping these things out on a regular basis, why even bother? Why choose store-brand cereal if you can afford Froot Loops? Why choose Freaks when you can choose X-Men: Dark Phoenix?
Okay, bad example. —Louis Fowler