Critic Reviews

The movie loses its way toward the end, shifting from wry black comedy to slightly overdone pathos. But there's plenty here to appreciate, making the title perfectly apt.

This is a weird little movie, and it's an interesting trip accompanying Dick Ritchie on his transformation.

Special recalls a minor-key "Donnie Darko," but its vision is much more limited, and it sinks into Indiewood cliché whenever it reaches for profundity.

Thanks to Rapaport's brio in embracing the hero's drug-induced delusions, the movie is less a failure than a noble experiment gone awry.

All that's left then is a miserablist analogue to M. Night Shyamalan's "Unbreakable," a sad portrait of paranoid delusion with wipe-out stunts played for the comic wincing of "Jackass."

Either way, it doesn’t quite go far enough as psychological study or cultural commentary.

Rappaport does a yeoman's job in this tonally confused oddity. The wonder is that Hal Haberman and Jeremy Passmore's Special is making it off the festival circuit and into theaters at all, however briefly.