RATING:

Starring: Michael Keaton, Deborah Unger, Ian McNeice, Chandra West, Colin Chapin, Anastasia Corbett, Mike Dopud, Aaron Douglas, Miranda Frigon, Mitchell Kosterman. Written by Niall Johnson. Directed by Geoffrey Sax.

Rated PG-13 for violence, disturbing images and language

Do you know the number of people in the continental United States who call themselves “Michael Keaton fans?” I do. The number, not counting his family, is seven. Not seven hundred thousand. Not seven hundred. Just seven. I know this because I’m one of them, one of the few.

My belief in Keaton runs deep. Sure, he might have dropped off Hollywood’s radar screen, but he’s still one of the best actors at portraying the “ordinary guy” in very unordinary circumstances. His characters are easy to like, his range is surprising, and underneath his chipper banter lurks just the hint of darkness.

For the last few years I’ve had a hunch—okay, delusion—that someday, from out of nowhere, Keaton would star in a surprise hit, garner a chic Oscar nomination, and then skyrocket to a John Travolta-esque comeback. Hey, if Travolta could recover from “Look Who’s Talking Now” (the second limp sequel, not the first), then why couldn’t Keaton bounce back from “Jack Frost?”

And who knows? Someday, maybe he will. But one thing’s certain: the comeback’s not going to start with “White Noise.” For the film is just that: white noise, static, vanilla—a generic suspense-horror-thriller that’s both uninspired and unremarkable. It’s not laughably bad, but rather a ghost story that’s not scary, not creepy, and not worth your attention.

As “White Noise” opens, we’re introduced to the happy-looking life of Jonathan Rivers (Keaton), a well-to-do architect who’s a “got it all” family man. Rivers is a less-comedic “Mr. Mom,” a loving father who needs to get his son to school and make sure that he eats his cereal. Keaton nails these kind of small scenes; even a simple line to his son like, “You want some OJ, buddy?” feels real, feels right.

Moments later his wife—not his son’s mother, incidentally, but this fact seems completely irrelevant to the film—Anna (Chandra West), finds out that she’s pregnant. And this, sadly, is where the film’s problems begin. There’s nothing likable about Anna. There’s nothing not to like, either—she’s just boring. She has no nuances, no quirks. Which is weird, since she’s supposedly an “acclaimed international author.” Couldn’t the writer (Niall Johnson) give her just one line of good dialogue, just one line? If she was a minor character, this wouldn’t much matter. But within two minutes of this happy little couple’s pregnancy-moment, Anna gets in her car and dies. Oops! Poor Jonathan. (For those squeamish about spoilers, don’t worry—this happens ten minutes into the film.)

Yet Anna’s not a minor character. Even though she only has three minutes of screen-time, her death is treated like a tragedy, and for about forty minutes it’s this traumatic event, or whatever, that’s supposed to lend poignancy. Because up to that point, the movie sure as hell isn’t scary. It’s not funny. And since Anna is so melba toast, we don’t feel any loss, so it’s not dramatic, either.

As Jonathan copes with the loss of his wife (and as we’re checking our watches), he gets some weird messages on his cell phone and notices radio-static in odd places. Eventually he learns about “Electronic Voice Phenomenon,” or EVP, a belief that the dead can communicate with us through electronic devices—anything from TVs to cell phones. Whatever. Curiously, there are many people out there who actually believe in this mumbo-jumbo, and judging by the movie’s opening quotation (which defines EVP for the audience), and by the closing stanzas, director Geoffrey Sax wants you to take the concept seriously.

Yet for an interminable length of time, these EVP signals don’t seem in the least bit dangerous. There’s no sense of threat. For a horror film—or even a supernatural thriller—this is a cardinal sin. Is Anna trying to reach him from the grave? Or does he just have a really crappy cell phone plan? We don’t care. The signals are treated far too matter-of-factly for us to be scared. And since Jonathan doesn’t personally seem to be in danger, we’re never creeped out.

Gradually, Jonathan grows more and more obsessed with using EVP to receive messages from his wife. He builds a Batcave-looking room that has a dozen or so TVs and computer monitors, hoping to electronically record her voice and image. He succeeds. Yet this revelation is lost on us, since we never had any reason to care about Anna or their relationship.

Finally, about 50 minutes into the film, these EVP messages, and the souls that convey them, seem capable of physically hurting Jonathan and those that he cares about. There are some malevolent ghosts, in the shadowy form of three faceless men, who want to kill the living. As Jonathan’s obsession swells, soon he tries to protect complete strangers from these not-very-scary phantoms. Too little too late. The end of the film contains some genuinely frightening moments, but they don’t justify the prior 50 minutes of tedium.

That’s not to say there aren’t bright spots. The production design (from Michael S. Bolton—no, not that one) darkens as the tone of the film gradually shifts from Jonathan’s sunny-beginnings to his eventual obsession. But a “good production design” is hardly a reason to go see a movie. That’s like saying that you should have booked a ticket on the Titanic because the food was first-rate.

[Sigh.] I should start bracing myself for a straight-to-video “Jack Frost 2.”

Agree? Disagree? E-mail me at jeff@latinoreview.com.