Ronney Mara and Channing Tatum (Open Road/Barry Wetcher)

Director Steven Soderbergh recently announced his retirement from films, and told Movieline that he used his last good idea in the psychological thriller Side Effects. Is it wrong for me to wonder which idea in here was good?

Emily (Rooney Mara) has a lot on her mind. Her husband, Martin (Channing Tatum), is fresh out of prison, and their modest life belies the fact that Martin went in for insider trading, suggesting a financially richer life than you see. If only it were an emotionally richer life as well. You see, Emily is depressed, which Soderbergh directs her to conveys through a flat delivery miles away from the spark she showed in David Fincher’s The Social Network, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The affectlessness suggests not range but a lack of inspiration, and when the film goes through it’s much protected plot twists, you wonder how this flatness was supposed to inspire all that trouble.

Press screenings came with a warning that nobody would be allowed in the theater once the movie started. But this is no Psycho, and the script just barely passes the definition of non-linear. The negligible time shift adds nothing to an increasingly ridiculous plot, which begins as a seeming indictment of the pharmaceutical industry but ends as something even more boring than that sounds, sluggish despite its much vaunted twists.

Jude Law and Catherine Zeta-Jones (Open Road/Peter Andrews)

There are two sides of Side Effects, and they both fall flat. The thriller is tepid, and the study of depression loaded with cinematic cliches. As Emily struggles with her depression, her face is kept out of focus until she’s told about a new drug and she comes quickly into focus. A scene of euphoria at a new drug Ablixa is prominently set on New York’s High Line. Get it? And of course Emily spends some time in the subway, teetering on the edge of a wan script.

That script, by Contagion writer Scott Z. Burns, had some potential for serious ideas and social commentary. Dr. Jonathan Banks (Jude Law), who prescribes Emily a fateful drug, shares a scene with his wife where they are both buried in laptops, a window into the lack of connectedness in our technological society. The early reels seem to point to an indictment of an increasingly overmedicated populace, but falls prey to a convoluted and kind of politically incorrect bogeywoman.

A recent Criticwire poll of favorite Soderbergh movies leans heavily towards my own favorite, 1998’s Out of Sight. There the chemistry of his stars worked within a moderately fresh and clever genre picture, a crowd-pleaser made with a cool energy unequalled in his work before or since. His final scheduled film will be a Liberace biopic for HBO. With Side Effects, Soderbergh says goodbye to the big screen not with a bang but with a cloudy whimper. Side Effects May cause drowsiness, acute eye rolling, and watch checking.

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Side Effects
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
Written by Scott Z. Burns
With Rooney Mara, Channing Tatum, Jude Law, Catherine Zeta Jones
Running time 106 minutes
Rated R for sexuality, nudity, violence, language.