For what the movie fails to offer, the two leads do manage to pull in strong performances that are worth watching. Dakota Fanning whose managed to pull in an illustrious career, gives a great performance as Emily, the dark haired nutcase who looks like a China doll with beautiful hair and big diamond blue eyes. Fanning is great here and really manages to play off well against DeNiro. Now while DeNiro really hasn't pulled in a good film in years, he does give a good solid performance and does this in his sleep providing the proper amount of dread and horror at the acts his daughter is committing... or is she?

Here's the inherent problem with "Hide and Seek". It's not so much that it's a really bad movie, it's just that as far as the movie goes, we've just seen it all before. Take elements from the thrillers you've seen in the last five years and you'll eventually come up with this film, and it has the gimmick of having a "surprise" plot twist in the climax that keeps the film riding on expectations, and the audience watching and waiting for that plot twist in hopes that everything they're investing in this dull bland thriller will inevitably be rewarded with a surprise plot twist that will give them satisfaction.

The problem there is that the plot twist is not that surprising, and becomes too painfully obvious halfway through. Anyone with common knowledge of thrillers such as this, and anyone really with a brain or an inch of common sense will know what's awaiting them in the gimmicky finale that fails to pay off and gives itself away with bad editing and all too obvious tricks of perspective that fail to provide the slightest bit of tension or suspense to this hackneyed murder mystery that disguises itself as pure horror. Who or what the imaginary friend Charlie is becomes all too obvious by the second half leading to the climax. There's just nothing here. Nothing at all. No heart, no plot, no theme, no suspense, no tension, no frights, no terror, no sense of dread, no energy, no craft, no skill, the list just goes on and on. It's empty, and audiences will find it's an empty experience.

When a thriller stays with you, it's done well, but people will watch this and move on to the next thing forgetting anything they've just seen. The makers hope to keep the audience tuning in also with the star power, but hanging on these threads doesn't help make the film any better. The director goes about the film as a J-Horror remake with plenty of moody imagery, old parlor tricks for suspense thrillers, and we even get a small girl with stringy black hair who looks aimlessly in to space in horror. We've seen this all before, and we never get anything new, not an inch of originality, nor a speck of something worth mentioning.

This murder mystery drones on with dramatic character devices, dialogue that goes nowhere, attempts at character chemistry that is spark-less, and actors that look as bored as we are. Watch Shue and DeNiro attempt to give romantic tension, watch Famke Jansenn try to compose a respectable role out of a basically throwaway character that is merely a plot device. Meanwhile, we have some very talented actors (excluding the two leads) that are just wasted and become plot devices whether they like it or not. We have Elizabeth Shue whose character is almost non-existent, there's Amy Irving who is only in the first ten minutes of the film, Dylan Baker who is only there to... well you know, and Robert John Burke who appears for a mere four scenes as a plot device, though the writers do take the courtesy to set-up a subplot with him that goes nowhere and is never resolved. And boy do the red herrings fly fast! Some dumb, and some-- just plain dumb.

Of course, they move to the country in an old, creaky, crackly, dark country house. DeNiro is supposed to be a psychiatrist himself and instead of moving his almost insane daughter to a general population, he isolates her further, then there's the slamming doors, the screeching cat jumping out of the darkness, characters introduced to die, Emily (Fanning) paints the wall and fills the tub in a morbid display, and her father is not even a bit frightened, and eventually we veer in to many far-fetched plot points.

The town is supposed to be small, but why does no one notice when one dies and goes missing? Why does Emily seem to enjoy doing what she does with Charlie one moment, but in the climax seem more like a victim? Why are we, the audience, always made aware of Emily's beauty as if it's alluding to something? Why do David and Emily move to the house for what seems like a few months, yet when "Charlie" is chasing Emily in to the cave it seems as if she and he had been there for years? Either way, it's all so empty with nothing underneath the surface. And while the climax does attempt to spark some originality, it's all just so derivative and pointless, which is made clear by the question mark (read groan inducing) last scene.

Though DeNiro and Fanning pull in strong performances, the film is ultimately your run of the mill disjointed, far-fetched, and very bland suspense thriller posing as horror with derivative plot elements, characters that are just set up to die, and a cast of heavyweights that are put to waste.

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