|
|
|
||
  
Back
Shelf Beauties |
The Reaping Every Oscar winner should be
required to watch The
Reaping to learn how NOT to screw up your career like
Hilary Swank has been messing with hers.
Between this and The
Black Dahlia, she is starting to enter Cuba Gooding,
Jr. territory. Swank stars as Katherine - a
professor and former minister who spends her time debunking what other
people
consider to be miracles and signals from God.
One day, she is approached by Doug Blackwell (David
“I can’t believe I
have a career after starring in Basic Instinct 2” Morrissey)
and asked to help
solve a mystery occurring in the small town of What is going on in this
small town? Can
Katherine get to the
bottom of it? The only way The
Reaping
could be worse would be if Swank put on a
bear suit and ran through the
woods. Director
Stephen Hopkins and
writers Chad and Carey Hayes have delivered a ponderous, boring movie
that
tacks on an ending when you realize we only have 15 minutes to go and
the damn
thing has to end somehow, someway before the remaining members of the
audience
who haven’t fallen asleep or walked out decide to riot. It’s a case of
the worst storytelling you
will see this year. Worse
yet, Hopkins
and company throw in all sorts of information that just
doesn’t matter, like
Katherine being haunted by her past, and never put in the facts the
investigation should be uncovering until it is too late to care. Instead of thrilling us and
making the audience commit emotionally and intellectually to The
Reaping,
Hopkins
tries to be mysterious and mystical, never accomplishing the task
because he doesn’t do more than make the screen all blurry and turn up the
mysterious and
mystical background music, while the
movie
proceeds at a turtle’s pace.
Then,
supposedly shocking and scary moments are thrown at us out of nowhere
with no
reasoning behind them, and no impact on the plot.
Plus, for a mystery, how come we see Ben and
Katherine gathering information, but rarely getting results and using
that
information to solve the mystery?
If you
are going to make Katherine a scientist, maybe you want to show her
doing
scientific stuff, rather than wandering around taking photos and
hallucinating.
There is no hope for those
who go to see The
Reaping.
The Reaping is rated R for violence, disturbing images, and some sexuality.
|
