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With a heaping helping of common sense, The Messengers could have been a very good movie.

Kristen Stewart stars as Jess – a troubled teen moving with her family from big city Chicago to a rural North Dakota farm, where Dad (Dylan McDermott) will be growing sunflowers (at least that’s kind of original, and provides for serene scenic views of the land, when people aren’t running for their lives and being chased by ghosts).  It’s a strange and isolated new world for all of them, but it is about to get scarier (I told you they were going to be chased by ghosts).  Jess’s little brother, Ben (Evan and Theodore Turner), who doesn’t speak, starts to see all sorts of frightening images, and, when Jess is left to take care of the little tyke, the house freaks out! 

None of the adults - Dad, Mom (Penelope Ann Miller) and the guy working on the farm, Burwell (John Corbett) – believe her, but can Jess figure out what is haunting her house before it is too late?

Directors Oxide Pang and Danny Pang (identical twins known as The Pang Brothers) know how to scare us and raise the tension levels in the theater, but they need to work on their storytelling skills.  We get creepy crows, ghastly figures, some sort of horrible incident from the past and a previous family that up and disappeared, but they, along with writer Mark Wheaton, fail to tie all of it together.  How it all comes together is what makes a great horror movie. The Messengers is just a movie with some scary parts.

Worst of all, the movie is missing logic and mystery.  The timing of certain actions by the ghosts don’t make sense with the revelations we get later in the movie, and the trio throw in an unfair red herring or two that don’t add anything of value to the movie.  Then, they try too hard to be mysterious. 

We need some exposition to fill in the blanks and make us understand why the family is not getting along (we find out too late after all sorts of meaningful glances and allusions to some incident from the past), show us how Jess develops a friendship with her new guy pal (how can we believe he is the only one she trusts when we have seen them together only a few times?) and a couple of clues thrown in along the way so the big twist doesn’t come out of nowhere (Jess does a cursory investigation about the house’s past, but not enough to be satisfactory).  I can understand why The Pang Brothers want to surprise us, but a well established surprise is better than one that comes out of left field.    

The Pang Brothers do a nice job with mysterious whispering voices, bumps in the night and menacing crows that just aren’t acting right, but the special effects are quite cheap, when they actually are used in the movie.  Then, you start to realize that Wheaton has probably seen The Ring, The Grudge, The Amityville Horror and The Birds because we get elements of all of them in The Messengers.  Overall, it’s a movie that doesn’t live up to its potential.

1 ½ Waffles (Out Of 4)                

The Messengers is rated PG-13 for mature thematic material, disturbing violence and terror.

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