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What hath God wrought? That’s the question the poster asked of me as I walked into The Reaping. Once the movie was over I still wasn’t exactly sure what it was God was supposed to have wrought, but I can tell you exactly what the filmmakers hath wrought: a steaming pile of crap.
Somewhere in Hollywood there must be a special place where desperate filmmakers go to get ideas. In this place there is sort of slot machine with three windows and a giant lever arm. Each window has the possibility of showing the title of some past film, some concept that can be rehashed. These desperate filmmakers hand over their dignity and respectability at the door in exchange for a token, which no doubt has Uwe Boll’s face on it. Dropping the token into the slot machine and pulling the lever, they anxiously await their results. This time around twin brothers and writing team Carey and Chad Hayes (the guys who hath wrought House of Wax) pulled the lever and received the inspired combination of The Ten Commandments, The Omen and The Skeleton Key. The resulting script that the Hayes brothers concoct is a horror film nightmare, but not in a good way.
Katherine Winter (Hilary Swank) used to believe in miracles. As an ordained priest she was so convinced of her purpose in life that she followed a calling and took her daughter and husband to a remote, and deeply cultic, African village to serve as a missionary. During her year stay the region experiences a severe drought and the locals sacrifice Winter’s family to appease their gods. Her faith shattered, Winter rejects the idea that there is a God and launches into a lifelong pursuit of debunking so-called miraculous occurrences.
Turns out she’s pretty good at it too. During her many years traveling the world to places where people say miracles are happening, she has discovered a logical and scientific explanation for each and every one of them. One day, while she’s giving a lecture to her college class (apparently they teach Miracle Debunking 101 at LSU), a man named Doug from the tiny bayou town of Haven (David Morrissey) shows up and asks for her help. Haven is beginning to experience what some of its painfully zealous citizens believe is a revisitation of the Biblical ten plagues and he needs someone to figure out what’s really going on.
At first Winter is hesitant but when Doug explains that the townsfolk believe the plagues will end if they kill a little girl (AnnaSophia Robb) who they think is causing the plagues because she murdered her brother, Winter is only too happy to step in and rescue the girl by proving the events aren’t divine intervention. With her Bible believing associate Ben (Idris Elba) in tow, Winter sets out to prove that a river of blood, infestations of various pests, and the mysterious death of otherwise healthy cattle all have a perfectly logical explanation.
As Winter and company are out doing their thing, director Stephen Hopkins does his best to find places to frighten his audience. From time to time he manages something gasp-worthy, but in general he’s forced to fall back on the sorts of gory and creepy stuff that are easy takes when dealing with Biblical plagues. Things like watching lice scatter over children’s scalps as their teachers shave their heads to eliminate an infestation will make your skin crawl, but the most bloodcurdling thing about the movie is the way it hobbles through its ache-inducing storyline. The visual effects are rather well done, but that’s a small concession when the setups are shallow and the scares are predictable. A slightly surprising plot twist at the end nearly makes watching the hour and a half long build up worthwhile, but Hopkins throws it all away with an absurd sequel-setup finale that offers the biggest scare of all: the thought that they’re interested in making The Reaping 2.
Apparently Hilary Swank has had enough of making interesting, meaningful films and what with a second Academy Award under her belt has decided it’s time to go back to making drivel. I would have hoped The Core was a fluke in her otherwise noteworthy career, but I guess not. She should be setting a better example for her young co-star AnnaSophia Robb, whose talent is also frittered away on this film. It’s not to say both don’t do a decent job with their roles, but that kind of compliment is pointless when the roles might just as well have been played by Paris Hilton and a child-sized mannequin with a running stunt double.
It’s not a secret that I’m no lover of horror movies, at least not the frenetic gore fests that are churned out by the roll these days. But I do enjoy a good scare, especially when it’s woven into a good story. The Reaping offers neither. It might have been better titled The Weeping. I know that’s what I felt like doing for most of the show.
In 2004 28 Days Later arrived as a pleasant surprise. British director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland had delivered a real modern rarity: A horror film with substance. Set in the early days of a pseudo-zombie apocalypse, the film followed a small group of people trying to survive in a world gone completely mad. What’s great about that original film is that it’s so much more than just another post-apocalyptic horror movie. 28 Days Later had something to say, as it explored the breakdown of society and questioned the very heart of human nature.
Flash forward three years and Fox Atomic is releasing 28 Weeks Later, a sequel made with a screenplay written by group of different writers, new actors, and helmed by a replacement director. The result is a film that feels like it only exists to set up another movie. It’s as if Fox executives counted the first movie’s box office receipts and then locked a committee of writers in a room and asked them to come up with a way to stretch this idea out into three movies. 28 Weeks Later is means to an end and, unlike the original movie, it has absolutely nothing to say except stay tuned and give us your money.
28 Weeks Later picks up, as the title suggests, 28 weeks later after the release of the Rage virus which started everything in Days. Rage is transmitted by body fluids and anyone coming into contact with the liquid innards of one of the infected is instantly turned into a crazed, flesh-eating, mindless killer. After the first movie the island of Britain was left ravaged and devastated, but apparently the outbreak was confined to those shores. 28 weeks later all of the infected, having eaten all the flesh they could find, have died of starvation and a US led military force has moved in to rescue the handful of survivors still left and repatriate those British citizens who were abroad at the time of the disaster.
Anyone who has seen a movie before will instantly realize this is a mistake. Should the world ever find itself in a similar situation, let’s hope the United Nations has the good sense to sterilize the place with a few nuclear bombs before letting people back in. Sadly, that would leave us with a pretty short movie and so we follow the well-intentioned but doomed military and civilian population as things go awry and they lose control. The film starts out following Don (Robert Carlyle), a father who was there during the initial outbreak and survived to be re-united with his kids by the military’s rescue force. His story is an interesting one, and might have provided the philosophical punch 28 Weeks Later so desperately needs to justify its existence but, after only a cursory brush up against his tortured past, the movie abandons him in order to devolve into a big, predictable, pseudo-zombie mess. It might as well be the latest Resident Evil sequel.
Except at least Resident Evil has the scantily clad hotness of Milla Jovovich kicking ass to help sell it. 28 Weeks Later winds up following a couple of kids as they run from the infected, leaving a trail of poorly acted and extremely dead adult characters behind them. The movie seems more interested in lingering over wide, aerial shots of a deserted London than in actually telling a story. When something important does happen, it’s buried under so many camera gimmicks that it’s hard to figure out what’s going on anyway. By the way, 28 Weeks Later’s idea of cinematography is to shake the camera around like it’s being ripped apart by zombies during action sequences, thus obscuring your view and, presumably, saving a lot of money on bothering with things like special effects.
This is a really thin, poorly developed script directed by a stand-in who struggles and fails to mimic Boyle’s movie without adding in anything of his own. Ok, that’s not fair. He does do a night-vision sequence. That’s new. It’s just not very good. If I wanted to watch the movie through a night vision scope I’d bring one with me.
There are a few solidly entertaining moments in the film involving the military’s attempt to exterminate the spreading virus and the civilian attempt to escape from it. A car pushing sequence which evokes the one from the first movie is well executed and there’s the aforementioned abandoned sub plot involving Robert Carlyle’s father character. It’s not enough though. By the time 28 Weeks Later shakes out and figures out where its going it becomes pretty evident that the movie only exists as a setup for whatever globe-spanning, big-budget zombie movie they’re planning to turn the franchise into next. This one is more of a paper-thin transition between Boyle’s gritty, gutty, unique approach to zombies and an almost certainly impending third movie in which they stick the number 28 in front of another standard, glossy, epic zombie apocalypse clone directed by Paul W.S. Anderson.
