Side Effects

The first half of director Steven Soderbergh’s alleged feature film’s swan song is excellent, while the second half is only passably good. Jude Law stars as a doctor treating a depressed patient (Rooney Mara) who is given an experimental drug with some nasty results. The film is at once a mystery and an indictment of the worldwide pharmaceutical industry, and it hums along nicely for a good chunk of the running time. Then, it suddenly becomes a mediocre Brian De Palma movie as the mysteries are solved, and it gets a little hokey. Good things happen before it unravels, with Mara doing some nice work alongside Channing Tatum and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Soderbergh says this is it for him. Hopefully, he just takes a couple of years off and finds himself back behind the camera someday. This movie is OK, but I would like to see him go out on a better note.