October 03, 2017

Flatliners. A piece of shit.



Here's a tip. When you want to see a film in the cinema the first thing you should do is make sure its actually on. The other day I made this very mistake. I was annoyed. The film is on release but dopey me went to the wrong cinema. But i said, feck it, I'd go see something else instead. The choices were a biopic of the writer of Winnie The Pooh or a horror film that's a remake of a pretty poor horror film. Seeing as it's October I picked the horror. More fool me.

A group of medical students risk their lives by using themselves as guinea pigs during an experiment to see if there is an afterlife. Predictably things go wrong. But not wrong in a good way. 

It's a shit film. It's nonsensical muck. The original wasn't much cop either but this is awful. In fact it retroactively makes the original look great. If I could have laughed at it fair enough but it didn't even raise a smile. Oh and filmmakers please take note. Loud noises and loud music are not scary. Stop. Give us characters we actually care about so we can be scared for them. Don't give us a shower of well to do pretty faces that no one in their right mind would care about. These characters are idiots. 2nd year resident doctors are supposed to be intelligent people. Not easily led fools who can be talked into insane plans in under 30 seconds. There's no threat. No sense of menace. No scares. A horror film without scares has failed at life. The internal logic of the film is all over the place. Things just don't make sense. The way problems are solved will make you fall over in disbelief. And the ending..........The film's current rating on Rotten Tomatoes is 3%. That seems overly generous to me. It deals with heavy, complex themes in such a half hearted way that I was actually dismayed.

The cast mostly sucks. Ellen Page is OK because, well, she's Ellen Page and she's always good. No one else makes an impact. The other cast members, even though they are a mix of race and genders all blend into one unmemorable grey amorphous blob. Diego Luna especially disappointed me. In anything else I've ever seen him in he's been magnetic. In this he had long hair. That's all I remember about him. Long stringy hair. English actor James Norton who was so good as Tommy Lee Royce in Happy Valley was dire in this. I wanted him to die from pretty much the second he appeared. Kiefer Sutherland makes a cameo appearance as a senior Doctor in some vain attempt to tie this to the original film. I kept expecting a lame twist to reveal to us that his character in this and the original were the same person but nope, the film didn't even have enough cop on to do that. Honestly, if i hadn't seen Chips, Baywatch or Assassin's Creed this would be the worst film I've seen this year. 

The worst thing to ever happen to horror was making it family friendly. This film is a PG-13 movie in the States which translates to a 12/15 certificate over here. PG-13 means money. It also means tame, wimpy films. I'm not talking about blood and guts, this isn't a film that needs that. It needs scares, it needs real brooding tension. It needs something because it's missing everything. 


Don't go. Save your time and money. I've martyred myself so ye don't have to. I'm sound like that. UGH. The best thing about it is Kiefer Sutherland's new hair.







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