Dead Silence
Universal Pictures | Release Date: March 16, 2007 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
34
METASCORE
Generally unfavorable reviews based on 15 Critic Reviews
Positive:
1
Mixed:
6
Negative:
8
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
63
New York PostKyle Smith
The dialogue isn't ridiculous, and sometimes it's witty: A cynical cop (Donnie Wahlberg) doesn't buy Jamie's theory that the doll had something to do with the murder: "The mystery toy department is down the hall. This is the homicide department." Read full review
50
The Hollywood ReporterFrank Scheck
Boasts nothing new under the sun, but it does provide a few decent scares. Read full review
50
Boston GlobeWesley Morris
This new movie is a more credible, less grisly act of filmmaking , but it's a less compelling exercise. It doesn't have the ruthless moral reasoning of the first two "Saw" pictures, however grotesque and specious that reasoning was. But it does have a plot that revolves around a ventriloquist and her demon doll. Read full review
50
The A.V. ClubScott Tobias
Again coaxing the worst imaginable performances out of his actors (see also: Cary Elwes and Danny Glover in "Saw"), Wan casts charisma-free unknown Ryan Kwanten as a young married man whose small-town past catches up to him. Read full review
50
Entertainment WeeklyScott Brown
Terrified of puppets? Enjoy being scared? Then you'll be half-satisfied with Dead Silence, a rote horror pantomime. Read full review
40
Village VoiceJim Ridley
Dolls are innately unnerving, but the movie's semi-menacing Charlie McCarthys never live up to their potential. As creaky nonsense goes, though, this is chock-full of corny goodness down to its hilarious sense-shredding "twist," which the movie reveals like a magician proudly unveiling a dead rabbit. Read full review
40
Austin ChronicleMarc Savlov
Wan does manage to infuse his film with some of the subtle unsubtleties of classic Euro-horror outings, chief among them the palpable, dreamlike sense of dislocation and the abiding severance from reality that tends to make nongenre fans wonder if someone spiked their popcorn with LSD. Read full review
38
TV Guide MagazineKen Fox
There are no two ways about it: A chubby-cheeked dummy doing stuff it shouldn't be doing is spooky stuff. But Wan isn't on such sure footing with his actors -- Wahlberg is stilted as the tough-guy cop, and Kwanten is blandly uninteresting. Read full review
38
PremiereGlenn Kenny
Too slack to do much harrowing and falls back on some very raggedy commonplaces at the points when it should be delivering knockout scares. Read full review
38
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Jason Anderson
The movie's uninteresting characters, boneheaded dialogue and flagrantly nonsensical narrative detract considerably from the virtues of the visual design. Read full review
30
VarietyStaff (Not credited)
Only those in a cold sweat for their weekly horror fix will bother with this formulaic and rather lazy exercise in booga-booga scare tactics. Read full review
30
The New York TimesMatt Zoller Seitz
The director, James Wan, and the writer, Leigh Whannell (the team behind the controversially brutal "Saw" series), deliver the mandatory shocks and gross-outs, backed by dissonant bursts of music and made almost elegant by the cinematographer John R. Leonetti's desaturated images. Read full review
30
Chicago ReaderJ.R. Jones
As "Saw" demonstrated, Wan and Whannell have a carnivalesque sense of fun and a sure instinct for recycling classic horror tropes, but their characters are so flat and their plotting so listless that this low-budget feature fails to generate much suspense. Read full review
25
San Francisco ChroniclePeter Hartlaub
There's no attempt at humor in Dead Silence, but the biggest sin in the film is the lack of scares. Read full review
0
Los Angeles TimesEd Gonzalez
A conflation of the horror genre's laziest tropes, plot angles and shorthands, this inept creation isn't so much a film as it is a smorgasbord. Read full review
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