Movies

‘Odd Thomas’ is more awkward than thrilling

What worked so well for Anton Yelchin as the protagonist of “Fright Night” — scrappy, clever young guy fights supernatural evil — falls flat in this adaptation of a Dean Koontz novel from director Stephen Sommers. The adaptation, actually, is a large part of the problem. Unwieldy chunks of exposition seem to have been cut and pasted from the page into characters’ mouths — predominantly, that of Odd Thomas (Yelchin), who’s saddled with both the ability to see the dead, and the compulsion to help stop bad things from happening.

And those bad things happen rather implausibly often. When Odd sees an acquaintance driving by, he deduces that the man has just murdered a young woman and promptly has him arrested. This is all presented as a normal day in the life. What?

Willem Dafoe has little to do as the sympathetic chief of police in Pico Mundo, the fictional desert-town setting. He’s a sort of sidekick, along with Odd’s girlfriend Stormy (Addison Timlin). But only Odd can see what he calls “bodachs,” the apparitions that signal imminent bloodshed (I kept waiting for an explanation of this random word being an acronym, but it never came). Yelchin is an immensely likable actor who does what he can, but his charm isn’t enough to save this awkwardly worded — and paced — wannabe thriller.