34
Metascore
15 reviews · Provided by Metacritic.com
- 63New York PostKyle SmithNew York PostKyle SmithThe 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."
- 50The Hollywood ReporterFrank ScheckThe Hollywood ReporterFrank ScheckBoasts nothing new under the sun, but it does provide a few decent scares.
- 50Boston GlobeWesley MorrisBoston GlobeWesley MorrisThis 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.
- 38PremiereGlenn KennyPremiereGlenn KennyToo slack to do much harrowing and falls back on some very raggedy commonplaces at the points when it should be delivering knockout scares.
- 38The Globe and Mail (Toronto)The Globe and Mail (Toronto)The movie's uninteresting characters, boneheaded dialogue and flagrantly nonsensical narrative detract considerably from the virtues of the visual design.
- 30VarietyVarietyOnly those in a cold sweat for their weekly horror fix will bother with this formulaic and rather lazy exercise in booga-booga scare tactics.
- 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.
- 25San Francisco ChroniclePeter HartlaubSan Francisco ChroniclePeter HartlaubThere's no attempt at humor in Dead Silence, but the biggest sin in the film is the lack of scares.
- 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.