This is one of those movies that has a good preview that catches your attention, but even as you watch the preview you can tell that the movie can't take the idea anywhere interesting. Any elaboration on the intriguing idea will just ruin it. If you thought you saw all the good parts and could skip the movie, you're right. When you watch the preview, and you see the images in the mirror act independently of the people reflected and make threatening faces when the people turn away, and you wonder what is going on and if the explanation will be at all interesting, the answer is no. The more you learn about what's going on, the less interesting it gets.
You also see Keifer Sutherland, as a security guard working in a crappy looking darkened building, and you think how it might be nice to see him in a different kind of role, especially after so many seasons of 24.
Well, predictably, the film's creators decided not to take too many risks, and Sutherland turns out to be just playing Jack Bauer all over again, like he wandered off the 24 set and crashed a horror film.
Yes, here he is, the law enforcement guy with the tormented past and the estranged family. He has knowledge of some threat and no one will believe him. He has to go off the grid, conduct his own personal investigations. and, finally, here he is as a desperate, frantic man, abducting a nun at gunpoint and screaming that he has to save his family. Yes, this is really 24 meets Stigmata.
That disappointing direction is the biggest problem, but it is not the only problem. there are too many clichés and tropes, such as the bitchy estranged wife. Sometimes I think every screenwriter in Hollywood is separated and having custody problems and has to work his issues out on film, but I've seen this subplot so many times and I was sick of it from the very beginning. Paula Patton, as Jack Bauer's estranged wife, really lays it on thick. The script calls for her to be intense about everything, all the time whether she is intensely annoyed, concerned, worried, terrified, you name it. She might as well just stand in the middle of the set just screaming whenever she's on screen, because it would have the same effect as her just reading her lines. It's too bad her character didn't actually get killed.
The sets are overdone just like Paula Patton's acting. The burned out mall doesn't look anything like a burned out building. It just looks like one big special effect. If they made it look like an actual place, the mirror antics would have been ten times scarier.
Sometimes in horror films the protagonists seem selfish and stubborn and responsible for their own problems. If we don't care about them, then they just seem selfish, as in this film. When Kiefer Sutherland is forcing the nun to go with him at gunpoint to save his family, I wasn't convinced that he and his unpleasant wife and snotty kids were worth dragging the nun into their problems. I really wasn't on his side at that poinnt, or for the rest of the movie.
You also see Keifer Sutherland, as a security guard working in a crappy looking darkened building, and you think how it might be nice to see him in a different kind of role, especially after so many seasons of 24.
Well, predictably, the film's creators decided not to take too many risks, and Sutherland turns out to be just playing Jack Bauer all over again, like he wandered off the 24 set and crashed a horror film.
Yes, here he is, the law enforcement guy with the tormented past and the estranged family. He has knowledge of some threat and no one will believe him. He has to go off the grid, conduct his own personal investigations. and, finally, here he is as a desperate, frantic man, abducting a nun at gunpoint and screaming that he has to save his family. Yes, this is really 24 meets Stigmata.
That disappointing direction is the biggest problem, but it is not the only problem. there are too many clichés and tropes, such as the bitchy estranged wife. Sometimes I think every screenwriter in Hollywood is separated and having custody problems and has to work his issues out on film, but I've seen this subplot so many times and I was sick of it from the very beginning. Paula Patton, as Jack Bauer's estranged wife, really lays it on thick. The script calls for her to be intense about everything, all the time whether she is intensely annoyed, concerned, worried, terrified, you name it. She might as well just stand in the middle of the set just screaming whenever she's on screen, because it would have the same effect as her just reading her lines. It's too bad her character didn't actually get killed.
The sets are overdone just like Paula Patton's acting. The burned out mall doesn't look anything like a burned out building. It just looks like one big special effect. If they made it look like an actual place, the mirror antics would have been ten times scarier.
Sometimes in horror films the protagonists seem selfish and stubborn and responsible for their own problems. If we don't care about them, then they just seem selfish, as in this film. When Kiefer Sutherland is forcing the nun to go with him at gunpoint to save his family, I wasn't convinced that he and his unpleasant wife and snotty kids were worth dragging the nun into their problems. I really wasn't on his side at that poinnt, or for the rest of the movie.