"The Invisible": F

I'm just about always willing to give a movie the benefit of the doubt. I can almost always find something halfway decent about any film to justify its existence. It takes a lot for me to call something a good movie, but I'll tolerate a lot before I call one bad.\nBut, with "The Invisible," I'm offended by how bad this movie is. I'm insulted by what passes for a plot for this film, which is actually based on a Swedish novel and film. Whiney, teenaged Nick Powell (Justin Chatwin) feels ignored by his rich mother ever since the death of his father. His mother (Marcia Gay Harden) is only worried about Nick's future and cares little for what Nick thinks and feels. Nick wants to go to a prestigious writing school in London after graduating high school. His mother just doesn't understand him.\nMeanwhile, a girl from the wrong side of the tracks feels similarly neglected by her family, but her chosen form of rebellion is to seek the rush of crime. Annie (Margarita Levieva) eventually gets picked up by the cops and, mistakenly blaming schoolmate Nick for ratting her out, beats him brutally and hides his body. Nick then wanders around the community as a disembodied spirit, trying, as the preview states, to get another chance at life by solving the mystery of his own death.\nThe problem is there's no mystery here, and the whole movie is torturously boring. We already know who the culprit is, so the entire film is Nick haunting Annie, slowly discovering how much they have in common. Nick realizes that he's just suffering from the human condition and blah, blah, blah. I expected a movie with such a potentially cool premise to at least try to pull off the suspense/mystery thing and not degrade to some teeny-bopper, emo-wannabe whimperfest\nEven if the acting hadn't been so horrible or the dialogue so melodramatic, I don't think there was any way to save "The Invisible" from its awful story. It must have been better in Swedish.