BY LARRY CARROLL | Imagine that you meet a guy at a party, and he starts telling you a story about this time that he and his childhood friends were walking through the woods in the early Eighties, found a young disabled boy, saved his life, and were rewarded by his bestowing special powers on them. Not a bad story, you'd think to yourself as you listened to it unfold - he might be crazy, but I'll listen to him for a while. Now, imagine that right in the middle of his tale, a new guy comes up behind you, spins you around 180 degrees, and starts telling you about the time he and his adult friends were in a cabin in Maine and found themselves in the middle of a deadly disease outbreak. You'd be interested in this guy's story, sure, but you'd be wondering where that first guy had gone to, and your attention would still be focused on that first, unconcluded, anecdote. Just then, pretend a third guy starts talking in your other ear about the time aliens invaded his town. Then, just as you were trying to figure out which of these three guys to listen to, a fourth person grabbed you, dragged you into the next room, and said, "You've gotta hear this story...it's about when I served in the military and our commanding officer lost his mind!"

You'd start to go nuts, not because the stories don't sound interesting by themselves, but because they're all so far-fetched, they're all incomplete, and they're all being thrown at you simultaneously. That's the feeling you get from Dreamcatcher, a movie that takes turns being charming, boring, suspenseful, silly, imaginative and cliched, and is ultimately brought down by its frustrating refusal to decide what tale it wants to tell. When this movie is good, it is very good. But that just makes the bad parts look even worse.

Henry (Thomas Jane, The Sweetest Thing), Beaver (Jason Lee, A Guy Thing), Jonesy (Damian Lewis, "Band of Brothers"), and Pete (Tim Olyphant, Gone in Sixty Seconds) are best friends who get together every winter at a cabin in Maine for their annual male bonding weekend of drinking and hunting. These aren't your average, American, working-class Joes, however - as we see in a flashback, they rescued a Down's Syndrome-suffering boy from a group of bullies when they were children. This Good Samaritan move resulted in each of them developing varying powers of clairvoyance. The boy they saved, who came to be nicknamed "Duddits" (played in adult form by an unrecognizable Donnie Wahlberg), wasn't nearly as weak as he appeared to be. They accepted their powers with some reluctance and, as our story begins two decades after that flashback, we see that they still struggle with the many dilemmas presented by their reward.

The chemistry between the four guys is terrific - very genuine and very endearing - a sign of the masterful touch of director Lawrence Kasden, who crafted similar ensemble bonds in films like The Big Chill, Grand Canyon and Mumford. These guys behave like real men do - they make fun of each other, they have certain words and catchphrases only they know the meaning of, they each have defined but unspoken positions (leader, goofball, somber guy, etc.), and they talk about pop culture like real people do, not in an annoying post-Tarantino way. Kasden brings magic to the one big establishing scene that has the four men sitting around a table bullshitting, and that moment carries these characters farther than most movies ever go in doling out personalities.

All of this is good, solid work, and it builds a foundation for the initial shift in gears. This happens when two of the guys head out into the snow to get some supplies at a store. The other two stay behind at the cabin and start witnessing some weird things - animals fleeing from the woods with a Noah's Ark-type urgency, military helicopters flying overhead, and a disoriented man with an abnormally large stomach who stumbles onto their property. I don't want to give away what happens next, even though it is only half an hour or so into the film, because the scenes that follow are the best (and most suspenseful) of the entire flick. For those who don't know, Dreamcatcher is adapted from a Stephen King novel, and the strengths of both the writer and the director fit together perfectly for the edge-of-your-seat tension that fills the screen for the next twenty minutes or so. Another element that helps all this is the Irwin Allen-esque technique of casting actors of equal marquee value to play the leads, so the audience doesn't know who might live or die. When this series of events inside the cabin is finished, audiences will be absolutely riveted.

Which is why the rest of the movie will disappoint the hell out of you. The second hour isn't terrible (it would probably make a decent, if forgettable, movie by itself), but it is predictable, unintentionally goofy, and horribly unfocused. Just as the first hour plays to the strengths of Kasden and King (relationships and tension, respectively), the second half exploits their weaknesses (a poor eye for action and a tendency to repeat himself, respectively). The four friends find out that the virus they've come in contact with is not of this world, one of them becomes possessed by an alien, and we meet a secret team of soldiers who are trying to contain the situation.

These soldiers are led by the drunk-with-power Colonel Curtis (Morgan Freeman) and his heir apparent, Captain Underhill (Tom Sizemore, Saving Private Ryan). The strange thing here is that, even though this part of the story has the two best actors, it is by far the worst segment of the film. Curtis (who was named Kurtz in the King novel as a tribute to Apocalypse Now), we are told, has lost his mind. This is emblematic of the problems with this part of the story - we are constantly told things rather than convinced of them. Freeman and Sizemore try hard with their one-dimensional characters, but by the time they're reduced to the inevitable chase and shoot out, you wish they'd just go away.

Not that the other characters are doing much better, however. The actor who does get possessed by the alien they call "Mr. Grey" (Duddits seems to calls him "Mr. Gay", which makes for all kinds of unintentionally humorous moments) ends up with a Gollum-type battle for his soul going on inside him, which we see as a series of "good side talking to bad side" dialogues. The problem here is that the actor chooses to voice "the bad side" by giving him an British accent, which puts Mr. Grey one maniacal laugh short of Dr. Evil-type parody. The actor does a fine enough job, but the British accent was a poor choice. Another one of the four main leads, meanwhile, is turned into an action star but has to abandon his personality in the process. After one hundred and thirty four minutes, Dreamcatcher limps across the finish line with an ending so generic that you get the feeling Kasden just wanted to get the damn thing over with. Leaving the theater, you'll be lucky if you can still isolate that first hour in your memory.

Dreamcatcher ends up being Outbreak meets Stand By Me meets The Hidden meets Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but the individual parts, at best, equal those movies; they never surpass them. Freeman and Sizemore are solid, but wasting their time. The four leads work well as a team, but as they start dying off and the dynamic begins to change, their weaknesses become more apparent. Olyphant and Jane are decent, but it's Lewis and Lee (in his best role since Almost Famous) who will be best remembered. The real star of this film might be the look - the gorgeous snowy landscape, frequently like a painting, provides a gorgeous backdrop for the action. It's a shame because, like that first hour of the movie, it just reminds you of how good this could have been.

Something that is actually good from the beginning to the end is the CGI short that will be shown in theaters along with Dreamcatcher. It's one of nine mini-films related to The Matrix universe that will be released on DVD in June. This one is titled Final Flight of the Osiris, and the word "amazing" doesn't even begin to describe it. There is more creativity in these eleven minutes than in most films ten times its length.

Director Andy Jones brought you the Final Fantasy movie a few years back, but don't hold that against him. He has taken that same state-of-the-art computer created imagery (now even more advanced) and used it to put the audience right back into that incredible world that the Wachowski Brothers introduced us to. This is not some watered-down spin off - Osiris will make every Matrix fan ooh and ahhh and curse the movie gods for making them wait another two months for Revolutions.

Osiris tells the story of a ship trying to make an important delivery as it is being chased by a fleet of seek-and-destroy robot Sentinels. The most impressive part of the short, however, is relatively unrelated to the plot. It has a man and a woman battling each other, blindfolded, in the training room. With their eyes covered and no dialogue whatsoever, most people will be tricked into believing they're watching real actors. It's only when the blindfolds are taken off, and the lips start moving, that the brain recognizes whatever unspeakable human qualities it is that keep CGI actors this far away from looking like the real thing. But wow, are they getting close.

Dreamcatcher grade: B-
Final Flight of the Osiris grade: A