Movie Review: Premonition

By Ron Wilkinson Mar 14, 2007, 12:07 GMT

About a woman (Bullock) whose husband (McMahon) reappears the day after his death. ...more

Sandra Bullock wakes up one morning and knows something isn’t right. Her husband is gone and there are strange people walking around her house looking very sad.

She is confused, and so is the audience. Her confusion is her job; the audience confusion is not a good sign. We wait for her to come through with some real acting that shows us the way. We also wait for screenwriter Bill Kelly to come up with a break in the plot that tells us what is going on, or at least where he is going with all this.  But he refuses.

The press materials talk about how the film is “like Hitchcock,” but Hitchcock knew how to dribble out the hints as the climatic last scenes approached. In this flick there is no dribbling of hints, we are simply lost until the last scenes and then we say, “Yeah, that sort of makes sense.  What’s for dinner...?”

Bill Kelly gave it a good shot with this wannabe suspense thriller, and Sandra Bullock and director Mennan Yapo did the same.  But something doesn’t work.  Maybe we are just too used to seeing her in shopping mall fodder like “Miss Congeniality” and “While You Were Sleeping” to believe she could possibly be the victim of an out-of-control sixth sense.  Where is the new Sissy Spacek when you need her?  Director Yapo just couldn’t get a real psychotic performance out of her.  He failed to make her either weird or convulsed with the terror of continuously seeing something that others don’t see.

Kelly knows weirdness, but in his last hit, “Blast From the Past,” he had wide-eyed kid Brendan Fraser to play the straight man, but he also had Christopher Walken and Sissy Spacek as the heavy artillery in the weirdness department.

So in this film Yapo and Kelly have Bullock, but no collateral weirdness.  Her husband, daughters and the few other supporting actors are like manikins.  Actor Julian McMahon (“Nip/Tuck”) starts off the film as hubby Jim as he and Bullock look with wonderment on their first home in the suburbs. 
Mistake number one. 

When Hitchcock started off “Psycho” it wasn’t with some trite middle-class suburban brainwash, but with down and dirty guilt and fear that immediately ripped the characters from the ranks of lucky normal people and made them outcasts on the run.  And we in the audience were on the run with them---guilty, fearful and shunned from gentle society.  We lost our homes, our families and our sanity for at least an hour that night. In this flick we lose our patience and the price of admission.

The problem with Bullock is she never ejects from normalcy. Hubby McMahon definitely never ejects---his standing orders for the entire film are to act normal, no matter what; and that is exactly what he does. There is supposed to be some contrast between him and his extra-sensory wife but she acts the same way so there is no contrast. 

Their two daughters, played by Shyann McClure and Courtney Taylor Burness, act like two girls walking from class to the lunchroom, even after one of them suffers through her gratuitous horrible and deforming accident.  Maybe somebody could have scared them before a take?  Added to this are out of control travesties of hackneyed plot tools including, if you can believe it, the car that won’t start in the lethal emergency and even the dropped coffin with the head rolling out.  Is there no justice to those of us who crave a really good scary movie?  Do we have to sue?

The sound track consists mostly of smacking and cracking of sharply dropped objects whose sounds seem intent on bludgeoning the audience into being afraid.  We are not afraid, we are reacting in a panicked way to get our hands over our ears before the next distorted, computer generated , highly amplified whoosh or shisst comes screaming out of the speakers.

Mr. Yapo, if you can’t do it on the screen, you won’t do it through the speakers.

All in all, a possible money maker via the PG-13 rating and tremendous box-office power of Sandra Bullock.  Also, parents, no major worries about nightmares or other post traumatic symptoms for the kids after watching, unless they are accidentally bored into comas.

A good scary movie for the family with young kids to watch together, as long as none really wants to be scared.  No awards waiting in the wings for this one.

Premonition
Directed by Mennan Yapo
Written by Bill Kelly
Starring:  Sandra Bullock
Runtime: USA:110 minutes

Opens: March 16, 2007 MPAA: Rated PG-13 for some violent content, disturbing images, thematic material and brief language