Dragonfly

Doctor Joe Darrow's wife Emily dies in a bus accident in Venezuela while seven months pregnant. Joe goes back to work at a Chicago hospital and notices a pattern in what patients say after near-death experiences: they all draw the same shape, and a dragonfly keeps recurring. He reads it as his wife trying to reach him. Tom Shadyac directed. Kevin Costner plays Joe. Brandon Camp, Mike Thompson and David Seltzer wrote the screenplay, Dean Semler photographed it and John Debney wrote the score. It opened on 22 February 2002 and took 52.3 million dollars against a 60 million budget, counted as a flop. The reviews were overwhelmingly negative. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 7 percent, the consensus calling it sappy, dull and muddled, and Metacritic at 25. Audiences saw it differently: the CinemaScore grade was a B plus. Who it is for: viewers who like melodrama about the afterlife and Costner in emotional mode. Who it is not for: anyone expecting the mystery to resolve on its own logic. The ending breaks the rules the film set up, and that is exactly where the criticism lands.