For most of its run time "Harlequin" plays like a kid's movie about a magic man who comes through the TV screen to heal a sickly child and work other miracles. You fully expect a tear jerker ending in which the magic man has to go back to his home planet, or where ever he comes from, but the kid will never forget him and neither will his parents.
Instead the movie abruptly changes gear and expects us to be scared of the magic man, despite him being the real good guy. Does the movie think that we are as ignorant and stupid and corrupt as the movie's real bad guys, the politicians the child's dad knows? They might have reason to fear him.
The plot: A sickly child of an up and coming senator is apparently healed by a mysterious stranger who performs as a clown at his birthday party. The stranger returns, "coming through the TV", and the child continues to get better. The senator doesn't trust him, but his wife, more interested in the kid's health, is prepared to let the mystery of this stranger be.
People start asking questions, and the stranger performs more tricks, first as a magician, then a faith healer for an old lady at a party. The crooked politician's friends want to see him disappear however, and will clearly stop at nothing.
It's like the story of Rasputin crossed with "Being There".
"Harlequin" is a trite little horror-fantasy with little horror and little fantasy. For almost all of the runtime there is nothing surprising in the movie at all. You can see every plot point coming, until the movie's sudden insistence that I would be scared by a character it does nothing to make seem a force of evil. The twist ending doesn't work because from what we have seen, the main character is the LEAST evil of all the characters in the movie! Hence the moment when we realise he - of course - isn't really dead is not scary, it's reassuring. I don't know how they stuffed that up so badly; it's shown like something you are supposed to be truly shocked by, but the feeling it brings is, if anything, the exact opposite, coupled with that feeling of annoyance you get when a movie misses what it's aiming at completely.
The actor who plays the kid is also singularly uncharismatic, and an awful actor. And why did they go out of their way to disguise the movie's Australian origin? The only Australian actor in the movie with a speaking role has his voice dubbed so we won't know.
Instead the movie abruptly changes gear and expects us to be scared of the magic man, despite him being the real good guy. Does the movie think that we are as ignorant and stupid and corrupt as the movie's real bad guys, the politicians the child's dad knows? They might have reason to fear him.
The plot: A sickly child of an up and coming senator is apparently healed by a mysterious stranger who performs as a clown at his birthday party. The stranger returns, "coming through the TV", and the child continues to get better. The senator doesn't trust him, but his wife, more interested in the kid's health, is prepared to let the mystery of this stranger be.
People start asking questions, and the stranger performs more tricks, first as a magician, then a faith healer for an old lady at a party. The crooked politician's friends want to see him disappear however, and will clearly stop at nothing.
It's like the story of Rasputin crossed with "Being There".
"Harlequin" is a trite little horror-fantasy with little horror and little fantasy. For almost all of the runtime there is nothing surprising in the movie at all. You can see every plot point coming, until the movie's sudden insistence that I would be scared by a character it does nothing to make seem a force of evil. The twist ending doesn't work because from what we have seen, the main character is the LEAST evil of all the characters in the movie! Hence the moment when we realise he - of course - isn't really dead is not scary, it's reassuring. I don't know how they stuffed that up so badly; it's shown like something you are supposed to be truly shocked by, but the feeling it brings is, if anything, the exact opposite, coupled with that feeling of annoyance you get when a movie misses what it's aiming at completely.
The actor who plays the kid is also singularly uncharismatic, and an awful actor. And why did they go out of their way to disguise the movie's Australian origin? The only Australian actor in the movie with a speaking role has his voice dubbed so we won't know.