Dragonfly could have been a great popcorn movie. It isn't.

A dark mystery with supernatural overtones -- we dast not say more -- Dragonfly takes a promising yarn and flattens it with inept storytelling and leaden direction.

Kevin Costner stars here as a bereaved doctor. His wife, also a doctor, has died while on a medical mission in Venezuela. Our hero cannot cope with his loss. He is obsessing about the woman he loved. Strange things begin to happen, and he comes to believe her spirit is trying to contact him.

Those strange things involve moving objects, odd voices and curious stories from children who have had near-death experiences in the hospital where Costner works. While those around him start to believe the widower is losing his mind, Costner's character continues his pursuit of an explanation for these mysterious, perhaps spiritual, events.

Dragonfly is directed by Tom Shadyac, whose past work includes Ace Ventura and Patch Adams. The pace of the film is off and the story is flat; clues are planted in an obvious fashion and then visually underlined, but you'll have to see the movie for yourself to understand what that means, for all who see Dragonfly are sworn to secrecy as to the details.

The performances are odd, given the cast -- Costner is surrounded by good actors in this story, including Kathy Bates, Linda Hunt, Ron Rifkin and Joe Morton, but none of them is given anything to do, and what a waste.

For this viewer, the dragonfly in the ointment is the script, the script and the script, jammed as it is with stuff that seems thrown in there just to be on the safe side.

Dragonfly is a ghost story about love. It has a couple of okay jump scares, but the subject matter would have been better served if the goings-on inspired dread, not the yikes! stuff.

Moreover, everything in Dragonfly relies upon a viewer's belief in the emotional bond between Costner and his dead wife, and that is never very well established. Nothing about the characters is very well established, come to think of it, and more's the pity.

The basic story in Dragonfly has merit, but the execution is pretty lame and that "basic story" is buried in nonsense.

One can easily imagine what another filmmaker (M. Night Shyamalan springs to mind) could have done with this material and this cast. Pity. (More on: Dragonfly).

(This film is rated PG)

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