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entertaining u newspaper: your weekly guide to entertainment
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Digital Movie Projection
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by erin thursby scopes1925@msn.com
Grade F Rated PG13 97 min.
I’m happy to suspend my disbelief at most movies, overlooking the occasional inconsistency in order to be lost in the world created by the filmmakers. In the case of Premonition, I would have to be on some pretty heavy drugs to counteract my disbelief at how incredibly rotten the movie was.
Going into the movie, I thought: well, how bad can it be? It’s got Sandra Bullock in it and it deals with time travel (a favorite plot hook of mine). Sandra Bullock has never been as unlikable as she was in this movie, not that I blame her. The horrific script and poor chemistry between Bullock and Nip/Tuck’s Julian McMahon are where I place most of the blame.
In most reviews, I try to avoid spoilers, just in case you might want to see whatever movie I’m reviewing. For this review, I’m just going to put most of it out there in the hopes that you’ll voice a premonition of your own when friends suggest you plunk down $8 to see this movie.
The premise is simple: Linda Hansen (Bullock), mother of two adorable daughters, is a stay at home mom married to executive-type Jim Hansen (McMahon). On a Thursday she gets the sad news that her husband had been killed in a car accident the day before. When Linda wakes up the next day she finds that it is not Friday, but that she has been transported to an earlier day in the week, when her husband was still alive.
Linda seesaws through the rest of the week this way, going back and forth alternating between days of the week when Jim was alive and when he was dead. They even throw in a shower scene a la Dallas (“Bobby you ARE alive! I thought you were dead! It all seemed SO real!”). I wish they’d done it ironically, rather than expecting us to take any of it seriously. I actually laughed when her husband’s severed head accidentally bounced out of the coffin. It could have been a better moment if they had just quietly opened the coffin. Honestly, I’d like to see the movie remade: Kevin Smith could do a rewrite and Jeanne Garofalo would play Linda. The same over the top plot could commence, but I’d be far more entertained by the dialogue.
As the movie progressed I cared less and less about the characters. I knew Jim was going to die and I wished he would hurry up and do it.
When Linda’s little girl ends up with a cut face, which she did not have when Linda experiences the week the first time, it should have been a clue to Linda that her action or inaction has an effect on the time line. Instead, until the last minute Linda just lurches along, doing the things that she was going to have done anyway (time travel does mess with verb tenses). Any interesting thoughts I may have been having about the nature of causality are killed before Linda witnesses Jim’s gruesome end.
Maybe it would have been a more effective thriller if the audience thought Linda might be a few face cards short of a full deck. Unfortunately, we never truly question Linda’s sanity, even though everyone else in the movie does. I think it would have made for a far more interesting thriller if we spent more time questioning her hold on reality. Linda eventually ends up committed to a mental institution, partially because of her outbursts and partially because she tells a psychiatrist of “premonitions” of her husband’s death before he dies.
She does manage to have lackluster sex with her husband in the week before he dies, leading us to the last scene, when Bullock stands up with a pregnant belly. The audience is supposed to gasp at this revelation of a “miracle baby”, her husband’s last gift before his untimely demise. I gasped because it was just a scene or two before when the doctor who prescribed her lithium has had her committed and is shooting up the supposedly pregnant Linda with what are probably anti-psychotics or major sedatives. I don’t know what shooting up major sedatives does in the first trimester, but I’m sure it can’t be good.
But the thing that aggravated me the most was the explanation for the time phenomenon. When Bullock’s character finally asks a priest what might be going on, he tells her that these flashes backwards and forwards in time are due to, get this: a lack of faith. Sure, he gives it a Latin name, but that doesn’t make it anymore palatable. Soon, all those faithless atheists will be making a killing in the stock market.
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