A successful sci-fi movie ALMOST to the end

Donnie Darko is so many different things that it's difficult to know where to even start to describe what watching it is like.

Here we have a story about Donnie, a smart young man very ably play Jake Gyllenhaal, and his increasingly disturbing run-ins with Frank, a Cassandra-like man in a creepy rabbit outfit who portends the end of the world right down to the second.

Donnie Darko begins on a weird note and never lets up. Donnie is a somnambulist - a sleepwalker - and often wakes up in particularly odd locations. One night the creepy bunny-man Frank awakens Donnie and summons him to the local golf course with a dire warning: the world will end in 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes, and 12 seconds.

Upon leaving the golf course the next morning, Donnie returns home to find his house - more specifically his room in the house - smashed by a jet engine from a plane the FAA swears wasn't flying overhead. In fact, they say NO planes were flying overhead the night before.

From here on out the story gets weirder and more convoluted as Frank returns again and again in increasingly disturbing encounters and goads Donnie into increasingly violent actions which range from flooding the school (and performing the superhuman act of embedding the axe he uses to break the pipes into the head of a solid bronze statue) to burning down a slippery, silver-tongued motivational speakers house with surprising results.

Richard Kelly crafts a superior story that aspires to nothing short of epic stature, and the actors and actresses who portray the small town characters who populate Middlesex - especially an impressively convincing and somber performance by Gyllenhaal as the simultaneously believable, psychotic, and identifiable Donnie - perform wonderfully.

Between the intense encounters with Frank, wormholes, and time travel, Kelly also manages to expose all manner of underlying illness in society without ever becoming preachy or blunt about it. In fact, most of Kelly's deft commentary is so sly in its presentation that you may miss the references entirely on the first one or two viewings (pay close attention to just how good of a shot Donnie is when Kelly is distracting you with talk of smurf sex in one scene, then keep that in mind when the end of the movie rolls around and the true identity of Frank is revealed).

Despite all that is good with this film, there is one glaring, painful flaw: the ending. The film itself is both effective sci-fi and excellent social commentary, but the ending simply takes everything that those two traits have managed to build and tosses it out the window with not just a cheesy portal-jumping mash of unexplainable, non-scientific nonsense, but cheesy portal-jumping unexplainable non-scientific nonsense that doesn't even fit any portion of the film's prior storyline.

Still, despite this flaw, Donnie Darko is well worth watching several times over.