This is an adaptation of a Stephen King novel, so I expected scary ghost stuff and weirdness. I was quite looking forward to it.
The first half an hour to an hour of the film lived up to my expectations - John Cusack plays a cynical parapsychologist and author (all Stephen King's stories have an author as a main character it seems), and he books into room 1408 of the Dolphin Hotel to investigate and write about it, despite the manager (Samuel L Jackson) virtually begging him not to. The room is indeed very creepy and before long it's obvious that there's something evil about it. The feeling I got of forboding from the room was very powerful, and I was uneasily looking forward to finding out why so many horrible things have happened there.
And that's where the film started to disappoint me. It all gets a bit generic fro then on. The room starts doing nasty stuff to him and not letting him out. Nothing grisly, just creepy. You wonder if Cusack is really in a haunted room or if he's going mad, or hallucinating. He wonders this himself. At this point the film could still save itself, despite resorting to common-or-garden ghost scares.
Then it ends. There's some odd stuff that I kind of got but didn't really make the story any more interesting because while I was watching it I was wondering why it was happening. I knew it was going to end without explaining anything at all, and that started to piss me off about half an hour before the end when it should have been getting good. Having read a few of Stephen King's books I expect it was something to do with him finding God or something, which I noticed somebody on the IMDB board also considered.
All in all, I can see it appealing to a lot of people. I like to have some back-story to consider when I watch a film though - some kind of clues as to why this evil thing is what it is, and 1408 delivers none. A lot of it is pretty chilling stuff, and John Cusack puts in a typically brilliant (and almost solo) performance, but the premise of it all just seemed to flimsy for me to enjoy it. There's an alternate ending <a href="http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=gDiGElMuykc" target="_blank">here</a>, but it's equally unclear and comes at a point far too late into the film to save it for me.
