Scott Smith's novel The Ruins was the feel-bad beach book of 2006 - it was merciless and unrelentingly grim and I couldn't put it down. Nothing about it struck me as unfilmable...until I actually saw the film that was made from it. The fact that The Ruins was not screened for critics last week should have been the tipoff, but every once in a while the studio execs don't realize what they have on their hands. This time they did, and they're washing it off as quickly as possible.
As a novelist, Smith (A Simple Plan) is a notoriously slow worker, but as a screenwriter I'm guessing he knocked this one out over a long weekend. By Monday he had misplaced his own book and started making shit up, but in the early going, The Ruins is relatively faithful to the original in plot if not in tone.
Two young American couples are vacationing together in Mexico, lounging poolside and chugging margaritas. A German tourist befriends them and tells them about an off-the-beaten-path Mayan ruins site his brother is investigating. They decide to make a day trip to the site as a token stab at taking in the local culture, the first of many terrible decisions to come.
No sooner do they locate the site deep in the jungle than they are surrounded by villagers armed with guns and crossbows. They won't be allowed to leave, we later learn, because high-strung Amy (Jena Malone) stepped on the thick growth of vines that cover the ruins - and like the ivy at Wrigley Field, these vines are cursed. They are apparently sentient, they can crawl inside your skin and eat your flesh from the inside out, and they can mimic sounds like cell phone ringtones or even human speech.
It is more or less at this point that the movie goes off the rails. It's one thing to read about talking, man-eating vines and manage to take them seriously; it's quite another to watch it play out on the screen in all its CGI crapulence. Events from the book that were suffused with inescapable dread - a descent into a dark mineshaft, the grisly removal of one character's legs - play out here as if Smith has a checklist of plot points he's rushing to complete.
First-time feature director and former fashion photographer Carter Smith brings little to the party, except maybe the ultra-bland cast, most of whom seem plucked from his latest Vogue shoot. (The exception is Malone, who actually has a personality but can't do much with it here besides sob and shriek.) The ending is a compromised botch, but it's too late by then anyway. The book was genuine nightmare fuel, but The Ruins is just another dead teenager movie.