The Ninth Gate (1999) from Tuna and Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

Two non-committal thumbs held about parallel to the ground. An OK movie which should have been a lot better.

Tuna's comments in white:

The Ninth Gate (1999) is an International co-production directed by Roman Polanski and starring Johnny Depp. That kind of talent probably makes it sound better than it actually is.

Depp plays a book researcher. A famous collector of satanic books hires him to authenticate a rare volume and compare it against the only two other copies in existence. It gradually becomes clear that there is immortality and a horrible power to be gained from a secret which requires all three books, and that Satan himself created the secret code. Depp has therefore gotten into the middle of something far more sinister than he had originally thought.

As the mystery unfolds, he collects a guardian angel in the form of Emmanuelle Seigner, and an enemy played by Lena Olin.

The DVD includes a commentary by Polanski, the key points of which are:

• The book he adapted, The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte, was far too complex for a film, so he greatly simplified it and made the narrative linear.

• Polanski saw the mysterious third book as the main character in the script, and viewed the unseen Satan as another major character.

• He wasn't sure why Depp played a one note character, but thought it worked anyway.

• He preferred to shoot this film studios whenever possible, because he used a great deal of subtle CGI.

• Polanski normally does not storyboard unless CGI is to be added, because he feels it restricts creativity.

In addition to wasting the immensely talented Depp in a one-note portrayal, The Ninth Gate lacks depth and complexity, and is overly long. It either needs more meat or a shorter running time. Polanski actually bragged that he didn't cut a single scene during editing, although he did shorten some, but he there simply wasn't enough substance to fill the 133 minutes of running time.

It did, however, look really good, the research on the satanic symbols was very good, and the magick books were rather convincing. All in all, this is an OK occult mystery that should have been much stronger.

Scoop's comments in yellow:

Interesting premise. Depp is an expert on old books. He is searching for the remaining three copies of "The Nine Gates", a book supposedly co-authored by Lucifer himself. Each of the editions has nine engravings, six drawn by the human author and three from the hand of His Satanic Majesty himself. The human work is uniform across all three editions, but Satan's three drawings are different in each book, so you need all three books to get the whole nine-gated collection. It's kind of like one of those supermarket encyclopedia deals.

Depp comes to realize that he must get the nine pictures drawn by Satan before some baddies do. Emmanuelle Seigner is probably some kind of guardian angel who protects Depp from the baddies.

Good start. It's a stylized noir, dripping with atmosphere, and featuring some deliciously campy scenery-chewing from Frank Langella and Lena Olin as the baddies. It exhibits some spooky CGI and some artistic set design from Polanski's team.

But for all the mystery and elegance of the premise, Polanski could not figure out how to resolve it ...

 ... or even whether to resolve it.