Twitter Reviews

8/13/08

Labels: , , , , , , , , ,

This film is an incredibly ridiculous supernatural thriller, that falls apart the minute it’s over, as you start to fill in the badly done pieces. It works okay for a while, good enough to keep you watching and wanting to know how it ends. But once some of the film’s mysteries start to unravel, you feel dumber for continuing to watch it. The film only works because of some blatant plot-holes and leaps in logic, that don’t make sense even in a world where Sandra Bullock’s life jumps back and forth between days of the week.

At the beginning of the film Sandra’s told that her husband has died, obviously it’s a horrendous day for her family and she goes to bed much worse for the wear. However the following day, she wakes up to her husband being alive again, and thinks her memories are nothing but a bad dream. But again she wakes up to a dead husband, and suddenly she’s going off the deep end, winding up the day by being committed to a mental hospital. Again she wakes up to her husband being alive. She starts to unravel the mystery of what’s going on, hoping that she can save her husband from dying.

She learns that she has a couple more days to figure out how to stop it all from happening. There’s one unintentionally funny scene where she ponders if he’s worth keeping alive, after she learns about his affair. Which pales in unintentional hilarity, to when she first confronts the fact of her husband being dead, sending his beheaded noggin rolling into the street; my favorite scene in the film. I’ll admit I was a bit interested in how it would come to an end, if it was in fact a self-fulfilling prophecy, something that’s always intrigued me. But once the groaner of an ending played out, and the credits started to roll, the film destroyed any sense of logic.

Premonition is a thriller for those who’ve never unraveled a mystery, and don’t want to spend a second past the end of a film, thinking about what they’ve just seen. Sandra Bullock dramatically over-acts her way through the whole film, ranging from hysterical tears to hysterical terror; her husband played by Julian McMahon, never sells himself as a real guy, I kept thinking he was going to jump into maniacal villain role. The filmmaking is typical Hollywood slickness, but with no real artistic or intelligent touches. But it’s the script that truly fails, with ridiculous scenes full of unrealistic dialog and actions, ending with a huge cheat. (Which I’ll discuss below) Grade: D (Seen on 6/19/08)


(Full spoiler mode.) So the film ends with Sandra crazily driving after her husband, trying to get him to stop his car before the spot where he’s hit by a truck. She ends up stopping him at the exact place where he was killed and as he tries to pull a u-turn, his brand new car breaks down in the middle of the road, leading to a truck driving straight through him and then nonsensically exploding. Those ridiculous events aren’t even the problems I had with it, because at the beginning of the film, she’s told by a cop that her husband has died. Yet she’s on scene when it happens. Why doesn’t the cop know that or even recognize her? Time is only mixed up for her. They also blatantly cheat another thing in the time-line. There’s a “shocking” shot where her daughter’s face is suddenly mangled. They show later that she accidentally ran through a sliding-glass-door, but in the time-line which they set for the movie, it happens before they learn that daddy is dead, in fact daddy shows up at the hospital. But at the very beginning of the film, when they find out he’s dead, her face is perfectly normal. They should have found another way around this, by shooting her only from the back or something, instead they simply cheat. Not that it would have made this crappy movie any better.

1 Response to Premonition:

  1. One of the worst films of 2007. Just a really stupid movie and the twists just kept getting more ridiculous as the film rolled on. I love Julian McMahon's work. I can tolerate Sandra Bullock. But this one blew BIG TIME. Felt like a Lifetime flick but without the soap opera mechanics that allows one to actually be interested in watching.