Aside from having one of the worst titles in recent film memory, “What Dreams May Come” fails by trying to be all things to all people.
Crank-em-out screenwriter Ron Bass (“Rainman”) adapted Richard Matheson’s novel about a heaven obsessed doctor’s attempt to retrieve his wife from Hell after her suicide.
Bass turns the Orpheus-like story into a sentimental hopscotch of didacticism on suicide and car-accidents.
Sound-byte platitudes like, “You must never give up,” “Thought is real,” and “Physical is the illusion” permeate the movie like so many olive pits in a dirty martini.
New Zealand director Vincent Ward (“Map of the Human Heart”) seems to have been run over by his own maudlin machinery.
Rated PG-13. 113 mins.
