By Claudia Puig, USA TODAYIf you had a sixth sense that this Sandra Bullock movie might be an incoherent, unoriginal psychological thriller, you were right. Then again, your assessment might have nothing to do with being psychic and everything to do with the awful ads and trailers.
Premonition is both dreary and absurd, suffering from a lack of intrinsic logic and terrible pacing, a one-two punch that kills off any chance of entertainment value.
Premonition is both dreary and absurd, suffering from a lack of intrinsic logic and terrible pacing, a one-two punch that kills off any chance of entertainment value.
The film is a kind of dim-witted supernatural Groundhog Day meets Sixth Sense, in which its heroine wakes up and doesn't know if her husband, presumably killed in a car accident, is dead or alive. The biggest problem is we don't really care what happens to her or to her spouse, thanks to the convoluted, confounding and unconvincing story.
Bullock's acting is fine, particularly when she's challenged in some of the film's better scenes to appear as if she's going crazy. But why does she keep choosing such forced and clunky pseudo-surreal material like this movie and last year's The Lake House.
Bullock's acting is fine, particularly when she's challenged in some of the film's better scenes to appear as if she's going crazy. But why does she keep choosing such forced and clunky pseudo-surreal material like this movie and last year's The Lake House.
The film opens with an intriguing set-up, but it loses steam fast. Bullock as Linda, a strangely distracted housewife and mother, appears to have an idyllic life with a lovely house, handsome husband and a pair of sweet daughters. She has her Stepford wife moments, but we're rooting for her. Our sympathies are particularly engaged when she gets the shattering news that her husband (Nip/Tuck's Julian McMahon) was killed in a highway crash. But, she wakes up the next morning with her husband unequivocally alive. Did she imagine the disaster or does she have the gift of clairvoyance?
This question haunts the movie until the end, when things are resolved not exactly neatly, but with a distinctly maudlin touch. The puzzle is never fully solved, just posited and explored, but rarely intriguingly.
If you value your time and money, you'll waste neither on this time-bending exercise in pointless frustration.
3 comments:
When I worked at Viking, we were one of the few publishers that still had a half-assed commitment to reading "slush," which is the general term for manuscripts sent w/o any agent representation. We'd get up to a dozen of these a day, and then reject nearly all of them a couple of times a year.
You'd see a lot of the same themes repeatedly, the most popular being what I called "Best Pet in the World slush," which were stories people would write about their own pets. Often they'd include pictures, and the letters would invariably champion the real-life aspect as a unique selling point: "this is a story about MY ACTUAL dog!"
One of these stories was a multi-chapter epic about a family taking care of some baby ducks. Chapter four started with a horrible shock, when one of the sisters woke up and looked in the duck coop and the ducks were gone! But it turned out the other sister woke up earlier and was giving them a bath around the side of the house. The point of this story is Chapter Four's closing line: "Thus a day of tragedy was transformed into a day of joy."
A bit overblown when it turns out the ducks are just over there. But it seems those people sold their duck story and they made a Sandra Bullock movie out of it.
"Your husband's dead! Oh, nope, he's just over there. Sorry about that."
"Your Your husband's dead! Oh, nope, he's just over there. Sorry about that." husband's dead! Oh, nope, he's just over there. Sorry about that."
That's pretty much the vibe of this flick!
JPX's review was much better.
I've never heard that term "slush" before. I like it. Makes me want to write a suspense thriller about my cats. I'll call it "Paw Prints on the Counter".
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