‘Silent Hill’ starts off with promise, but fails

In theaters

SILENT HILL, directed by Christophe Gans, written by Roger Avary, 125 minutes, rated R.

The latest movie inspired by a popular video game is Christophe Gans’ “Silent Hill,” which turns out to be the literary equivalent of JavaScript fueled by a Pentium-II chip.

Screenwriter Roger Avary had the unhappy task of adapting the computer code into words, though his unusually chatty movie unfortunately doesn’t take a cue from the title or even from the movie’s poster, which features a young girl staring intently at us from the gloom. She has no mouth. For some, she either will be the embodiment of Speak No Evil or the perfect child. For others, perhaps a bit of both.

The film stars Radha Mitchell as Rose, Sean Bean as her husband, Chris, and Jodelle Ferland as their adopted daughter Sharon, who as the movie begins has sleepwalked to the edge of a cliff, from which she has every intention of jumping.

Since there wouldn’t be much of a movie if she did, Rose naturally sandbags her just in time to hear her whisper the words, “Silent Hill,” which apparently is enough to set the gears of the plot in motion.

Rose becomes consumed with the idea of finding out what Silent Hill is and why Sharon suddenly is scribbling in ways that children tend to scribble in horror movies when something isn’t quite right with their wiring. Her drawings depict people burning alive in a satanic hellfire – not exactly the pleasant pictures a parent favors for showcasing on the family refrigerator and a far cry from the happy colors that once brightened Sharon’s palette.

Initially, what unfolds is creepy and atmospheric, with Rose taking off with Sharon to Silent Hill, W.Va., while Chris frets at home before deciding to go after them. It’s a good thing he does, because when Rose and Sharon do reach Silent Hill after a brisk run-in with a lady cop (Laurie Holden, replete in skin-tight black leather), what they find is a ghost town that quickly absorbs all of them, including the cop, into what can best be described as a parallel universe.

Inside, a former coal mining town is burning beneath the surface. The air is smoky; embers fall from the sky. When Sharon goes missing after a car wreck, Rose goes in search of her, which leads her deep into a town filled with its share of secrets, curses and monsters – the inhuman and human sort.

“Silent Hill” gets the monsters and the sets right; they are imaginative and well-drawn in ways that the plot simply isn’t. After a promising first hour, in which it appears that the movie will shrewdly eschew gore for mood and chills, the film slides into a muddy, clumsy affair in which the many subplots tear away at the center, shredding any trace of sense along the way.

At two hours, the film is too long by a third, but that’s because it must attempt to mend all of the loose threads it leaves in its wake. It doesn’t do so – it would take a skilled programmer to figure out this code – and neither Gans nor Avary prove up to the task.

Grade: C-