Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
3/17/07
*** SPOILER WARNING:
PREMONITION IS A MOVIE THAT'S PRETTY MUCH IMPOSSIBLE TO DISCUSS IN ANY
MEANINGFUL WAY WITHOUT GETTING INTO HOW IT ENDS. IF (AND IT WOULD
BE A MISTAKE) YOU WISH TO SEE IT UNSPOILED, PROCEED NO FURTHER ***
There's a whole modern genre
of thrillers that are the bastard children of Pulp Fiction and The
Sixth Sense: mix up the timeline, leave the audience guessing
what the Hell's going on, and keep things moving at the slowest possible
pace to maximize suspense. The problem with most people who try to
knock off the works of Tarantino and Shyamalan is that they get the style,
but not the substance. Perhaps the ultimate example of this is the
awful new Sandra Bullock thriller Premonition, whose events can
only be explained as the story of a woman trapped in God's really bad spec
script.
Linda Hanson (Bullock) lives
a vaguely sad, unfulfilling life with her husband Jim (Julian McMahon)
and daughters Megan (Shyann McClure) and Bridgette (Courtney Taylor Burness).
One day, a policeman shows up at her door to tell her that her husband
was killed yesterday in a horrible accident. After a mournful day
in the company of family and friends, she goes to bed and awakens... to
find Jim seated at the kitchen table eating breakfast. Turns out,
he hasn't died. She's creeped out, but Linda's slowly settling back
in when she goes to bed and awakens to find that it's the day of Jim's
funeral. And so it goes, back and forth, past and future, as Linda
tries to figure out what's going on, if there's any way to save Jim, and,
after finding out about his relationship with co-worker Claire (Amber Valletta),
if she even wants to.
We throw around the words
“That movie made no sense” a lot, but Premonition represents a new
low. Sure, it has a great idea for a paranormal thriller, having
a character actually experience one of those Pulp Fiction swiss-cheese
narratives in the same chronological order the audience is seeing it.
There's only one problem: Linda never shows much interest in solving
her problems, only figuring out what's happening. She has myriad
opportunities to act in the past to prevent things she's seen in the future,
but never takes them, not even to prevent injury to one of her daughters.
And worse yet, when she finally decides, in the closing moments, to take
control of her situation, she only ends up causing the very thing she sought
to prevent.
So, with such a passive emphasis
on the puzzle, the answer must be quite detailed and clever, right?
Uh, actually, we don't get one. At one point, Linda pays a visit
to a most peculiar Priest (24's Jude Ciccolella, handing out even
worse advice than he used to give President Palmer), who's ready with such
an encyclopedic knowledge of paranormal phenomena that he's got a book
with Post-it Notes on every page that documents an experience like hers.
Thankfully, he's polite enough not to read them all for us, and at one
point says “Let's just skip ahead to the 20th Century.” Then who
are all the other Post-it Notes for? Does he get a lot of parishioners
with this problem? He's also got an utterly unhelpful theory that
the vacuum created by Linda's apparent lack of faith has opened her to...
uh, something. This scene is almost worth the price of admission:
it's wrong on so many levels, I've never seen anything quite like it. And
the movie is so proud of this explanation that it repeats it as a voice-over
at the very end, as if to say “What do you mean we didn't explain anything,
don't you remember the faithlessness thing!?!”
Which is not to say that
Premonition
isn't intriguing at first: director Mennan Yapo is actually pretty
good at setting the “Shyamalan tone”, and the early parts of Bill Kelly's
script are filled with creepy moments and disturbing portents. One
scene where Linda slips in her yard and slams her hand into a dead bird
both shocked and disgusted me (there's not enough soap in the world to
wash that out, folks!). But as the story progressed,
I became more and more frustrated with Linda's thick-headedness.
And the first really big revelation (the reason for that injury her daughter
has in the future) is so pedestrian that it removes all hope that we're
building toward something cool.
In fact, we're building toward
one of the worst endings I've ever seen. While you can pretty successfully
guess from the trailer that the movie has only two possible endings, I
defy anyone to explain, given what happens to Jim at the end, why Linda
has the visions in the first place. If she has no visions, he doesn't
die. And if his death is only an accidental consequence of her being
“unstuck in time”, there's no excuse for the “horror movie idiot” ways
Linda behaves, including her absolute refusal to tell anyone who matters
what's happening to her, and her inability to summon the five simple words
“There's a truck behind you!” at a crucial moment. Jim Kelly's script
is bad enough at first glance, but it dissolves like ice cubes on a George
Foreman Grill when thought about. How can the events of the past
come as a surprise to Linda when she's presumably already lived them?
If she hasn't, why isn't she surprised to be in the future when the movie
starts?
Furthermore, speaking as
a guy, the movie's drippy Lifetime Channel worldview is an eye-roller.
I suppose that in certain The View-watching circles, considering
having an affair is worthy of the death penalty. But for the rest
of us, if we're supposed to actually sympathize with the way Linda reacts
to the news of Jim and Claire's relationship, wouldn't it have been better
for them to have done more than just talk about cheating?
Jim's just as dead either way... And the final-shot “Happy Ending”
makes me suspect that we're supposed to be glad that the guy's out of the
way so now it's just Linda and her daughters.
In the face of such an awful
script, performances don't much matter, but a pretty good cast is wasted
here. Bullock is a great actress in her element, but she's unable
to really put us inside Linda's thick skull. And the usually slick
and devlish McMahon can do nothing with the morally inert Jim. Peter
Stormare makes a great entrance as a psychiatrist Linda makes the mistake
of turning to, but after a couple of scenes, he vanishes. Nia Long
as her best friend and Kate Nelligan as her mother are stuck with characters
who do little other than fail to ask the right questions.
Premonition is very
interesting for about 30 minutes, progressively less so for the next hour
and then jaw-slackening as it concludes. Once you've seen the whole
thing, there's not a single reason (well, maybe that crazy scene with the
Priest) to have done so. Lame psychobabble in search of a plot, Premonition
is a movie that would never had been made had Bruce Willis only stayed
dead or John Travolta waited until the end to get shot. That does
make changing the past tempting, doesn't it? |
