Take me to Nutter Island!

Is it just me or has everyone gone insane?

Or maybe it's just Martin Scorsese...

He certainly seems to have lost it on his latest flick with Leo DiCaprio, Shutter Island.

Here's my two cents' worth for those that missed it in the weekend:

SHUTTER ISLAND (R16) Directed by Martin Scorsese **1/2  

Shutter Island is possibly one of the shonkiest pieces of mawkishly manipulative rubbish ever created by such a long list of talented people.

Martin Scorsese uses his current male muse to take the audience into the slippery world of the insane asylum. Yep, Leonardo DiCaprio is on a boat to nutter island.

Based on the Dennis Lehane novel and set in 1954, Shutter Island opens with two United States marshalls approaching the fortress-like island on a prison ferry to investigate a disappearance. One of the criminally insane inmates has gone missing from her cell, as if she had evaporated into thin air.

Teddy Daniels (DiCaprio) and his new partner Chuck (Mark Ruffalo) have to negotiate their way past the prison psychiatrists Dr Cawley (Ben Kingsley) and the suspiciously German-sounding Dr Naehring (Max von Sydow) as well as restrictions on their movements. In the meantime, Teddy is suffering from headaches and visions of his dead wife, as well as flashbacks to his time as a soldier, discovering the Dachau death camp.

Just as Teddy is getting frustrated at his investigation being baulked by the authorities, the island is hit by a huge storm so no one can leave and communication with the outside world is cut.

But where is the missing woman, what is the significance of number 67, and what is really going on in the lighthouse? Does anyone care?

One of the biggest problems is that since the setting of the film is an insane asylum, the audience immediately distrusts the veracity of what is being told. From there the unravelling of the story is pretty simple.

Lousy CGI is matched with a painfully overbearing, ominous score, shoddy continuity and obvious body doubles. It could be argued that the dodginess of all these factors is deliberate to give the viewer a sense of unease, but the overwhelming feeling I got was the desire to leave the theatre about a third of the way into the two-and-a-half-hour plod-fest.

The only genuinely unsettling elements for me were discovering how poor Scorsese is at building tension and how badly his attempts at scares misfire. At one point a prison warden lurches out of the darkness to warn how scary the inmates are - cue scary inmate. Quelle surprise.

There are many good people here - including Michelle Williams, Emily Mortimer, Patricia Clarkson and Jackie Earle Haley - but all are playing paper-thin stock characters that could easily slot into the kooky cast of the TV show Lost.

Some film critics have described this movie as Hitchcockian, but Hitch would surely be spinning in his grave at the notion.

The muddied waters of the plot clear near the end with an extended exposition to reveal "the truth" but the big twist we've been waiting for is mawkish and manipulative rather than moving or emotional.

The final little twist has the potential to offer some payoff, but by then I was just waiting for the credits to roll. M Night Shyamalan would have dismissed the twists as too cliche and predictable.

Scorsese and DiCaprio have created movie magic in the past, which just makes their fourth film together in eight years seem all the worse for what could have been.

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So... not my favourite Scorsese film.

But today's burning question is:

What, in your opinion, is the craziest island in movie history?

Here are 15 weird islands in film (and TV) history to help you jog your memory...

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