Johnny Depp hit it big in 1999 in the box office success Sleepy Hollow, a supernatural thriller. In March of 2000, he starred in another so-called "supernatural thriller" The Ninth Gate, which failed to make a tenth of what Hollow did. There is a reason. Actually, there are several.

Johnny Depp plays a book expert who is hired by a rich figure to track down a couple of books in Europe that are seemingly exactly the same to his own. It is Depp's job to discover which one, if not all three, is the real book. The book is supposed to contain the answers to bring the devil to Earth. Of course, as Depp begins to investigate, he is followed by assassins and stuff like that.

But The Ninth Gate isn't an action movie. There are maybe a few small scenes where Depp encounters a bad guy and they wrestle around a little bit, but there's really nothing of excitement. It's definitely not a supernatural thriller - if anything, there is about three minutes of things out of the ordinary, and three is pushing it. Furthermore, The Ninth Gate really isn't that thrilling or suspenseful, since Depp is a book expert, not an action hero.

The movie, throughout most of the movie, makes it seem as though there is an intriguing story, even though there isn't. I was mildly entertained through most of the film as Depp went around trying to figure out the significance of the discrepancies between the books. I wasn't that taken by the "thrilling" aspects of the story but his investigation was pretty good.

But the ending sucked. The ending is cheesy and fake, and not very suspenseful. The person behind everything is very predictable and the other villain is quite obvious as well. As mentioned earlier, there is really nothing supernatural about the movie, including the ending. There is an attempt to be supernatural but the movie falls flat on its face.

The Ninth Gate does have some interesting factors but all together it doesn't work. It's marketed as a supernatural end of days thriller and is not. It has a bad soundtrack. It isn't suspenseful. It has a bad ending. The only thing saving it from complete damnation is its simple but intriguing story. The Ninth Gate, however, is still stuck in purgatory.

Review by Erik Samdahl unless otherwise indicated.