Death Note

Full disclosure: I have never read the Japanese manga series "Death Note," written by Tsugumi Ohba and illustrated by Takeshi Obata. I have never seen the anime series that breathed new life into this material, nor have I watched any of the three live action adaptations released in Japan. What I have seen is the newest American adaptation, a Netflix-exclusive release, also entitled "Death Note." And what I can tell you is that this particular movie is garbage.

"Death Note" is one of those adaptations that feels like its creators took bold, original ideas and filtered them through a cinematic cheesecloth of excruciating mediocrity. The script comes to us from the co-writers of 2011's "Immortals," a bad but harmless movie, with a rewrite by the writer of 2015's "Fantastic Four," a genuinely terrible film. The dialogue stings your cheek by constantly slapping you across the face with heavy-handed exposition and eye-rolling absurdity, harmonized by the aggressively robotic acting by much of the cast (but, with the words they're given, can you really blame them?).

The story follows a high school outcast named Light Turner (Nat Wolff) who receives a book called "Death Note," which falls from the sky. The book is accompanied by a death demon named Ryuk (Willem Dafoe, in a cheap and disastrous-looking motion capture performance), who informs and tempts Light of the book's power: Write in any person's full name while imagining their face, followed by a cause of death, and lo and behold, they are killed in exactly that manner.

Light uses the power to target criminals and wrongdoers, eventually joining forces with cheerleader Mia (Margaret Qualley) to initiate a global cleansing of the world's most evil people, under the guise of a wrathful God named Kira. There's a bafflingly uncomfortable montage of this entire process, where Light and Mia make out while writing names of pedophiles, murderers and drug dealers in the "Death Note" book. Eventually, this draws the attention of a mysterious crime solver named "L" (Lakeith Stanfield), who eats a lot of candy while obsessively getting closer to the truth about Light and Mia.

It's admittedly a wildly original story, but the film consistently plays it tame and timid. Even when the blood is spraying in buckets and the silliness runs high, the movie is inert. Director Adam Wingard has embarked on an almost-impressive decline since his surprising horror-comedy breakout film, "You're Next," only to disappoint exponentially with last year's "Blair Witch" and now this latest edition of who-gives-a-shit cinema. Shots in "Death Note" are lazy and stylized with no purpose, while much of the movie is lit like a bargain-basement "Twilight" knockoff.

The tonal shifts in both visuals and theme are so jarring it feels like an out-of-tune karaoke performer serenading the audience with an awkward and inexplicable mash-up of Katy Perry and Korn. Nothing seems to work in unison, and as a result, the individual pieces feel wonky. If anything, the title of "Death Note" refers to the film's ultimate impact - a one-note work that bores you to death.