Finally resuming my regularly scheduled Netflix queue, since I've been consuming many movies lately in no particular order, I watched the last in a string of thrillers and in a couplet of Sandra Bullock films, to which I've previously referred in this blog. I don't know why I am drawn to Bullock's films other than what I explained in my bloggy review for Murder By Numbers. She has a relatable appeal to me. As far as Premonition is concerned, I was also interested in the fact that it featured Julian McMahon, who I have liked since his Charmed days (though I haven't been following Nip/Tuck). I had no preconceived notions about Premonition, though I did see that the film has received some generally average to poor reviews on Netflix and here on Spout. I guess I should have had the foresight to know and understand what that would mean because Premonition is nothing close to what it is billed to be.
Bullock plays Linda Hanson, an average suburban housewife with an adoring husband and two doting daughters. One morning, she receives word that her husband Jim (MacMahon) has died in a car accident the day before while on a business trip, and it devastates her. Numb from the shock, she attempts to live through this horrible day, but when she awakes the next morning, she finds her husband alive and well. As a sense of normalcy begins to settle in, puzzling though this news is, she convinces herself that the preceding day's events were actually part of a vivid but disturbing dream. The problem, however, is that her reality becomes more and more surreal as she wakes each new day, seeming to shift from past to future to past again, where her husband alternates from being either alive or dead. As she investigates her circumstances in an effort to prevent what her premonition has showed her, she finds that her "normal" reality was not everything - or as normal - as she thought it was. In order to save her husband and her family, however, Linda must solve the mystery rendering her suspended between what seems like two separate times and, therefore, two separate planes of reality.
Premonition was tough to get through. As a premise, the idea was definitely intriguing, even if not completely new and fresh, and the film was rife with the possibility of being a decent thriller until such possibility was squandered through sloppy execution. A woman has a grisly premonition about her husband and must beat time to try to stop what she has seen, should she want to save her husband from his inevitable fate. It's one of those old chestnuts that could be mined for any number of possible thrilling angles. The trouble is, the screenwriters and the director, Mennan Yapo, failed to develop the characters, to connect the shuffling timeframes (except through a clever plot device in the form of a calendar Linda creates that was never resolved), to bring any closure to the story arc that made sense, or to offer a reason why the audience should care that Linda has experienced such a disjointed journey through time and space. Sometimes, I like to quote the All Movie Guide, if their review says it better than I can think to articulate. I do so, here again, for that reason: "The problem is that [the] rules don't make much sense. Why is Bullock's Linda Hanson living the days surrounding her husband's death out of sequence? Is she crazy? Or is she just caught in a series of conundrums that exists merely for the sake of a clever script? It's risky to legislate the logic of time travel/future sight, but as with most well-worn devices, there are guidelines that cause a viewer either to suspend disbelief, or just to disbelieve. It's possible to sit there and watch the days of Linda's life being shuffled like a deck, to marvel at the basic skill in how it's being executed, and to still find yourself asking, 'Well, so what?'"
After watching Premonition, that's exactly where I sit. Well, so what? It's possible, given the belated way in which it was introduced into the story, that the story is ultimately about having or renewing faith. Linda, after all, in the last third of the film, seeks advice from her priest, whom she apparently has not seen for a long time, and waxes on about how she has lost all of her faith in everything. Of course, there was no story development to bring us to this crisis, other than the scant clues and string of bad news Linda receives while dealing with the disjointed timeline. By the end of the film, however, the viewer is not given any insight as to whether her crisis has been resolved, or if this was the crisis we were meant to care about all along.
Frankly, the execution of the shuffled deck of timeframes in this piece was not all that skilled or marvellous, anyway. The plot device of using a new day to signify Linda's jump through time essentially relieved the director or the screenwriters of having to be too clever about presenting each day in a way that was both satisfying to the unfolding of or to the resolution of the mystery, at least to the extent a resolution exists. The story was presented in this way: ok, here's this day. Ok, here's this day in the past. Ok, here's this day in the future, and so on, until Linda de-scrambles the scrambled chronology of her predicament. Serving the plot this way undermined any potential thrills to be had from the film, at least for me.
In point of fact, Yapo attempts to create a creepy, surreal ambiance in the style of M. Night Shyamalan, using an atmospheric score, subdued or muted cinematography, and a clipped tempo to emphasize the urgency of certain plot points, but doesn't really pull off the intended result. In fact, love or leave him, Shyamalan produced a better film about renewing faith with supernatural and/or extraterrestrial elements in Signs. I recommend that film, which, on a production scale, was better performed, better directed, better written, and at least more satisfying than this movie (whether you saw the aliens or not; I know that's a subject of much debate amongst the Shyamalan lovers and haters).
As for Premonition, the movie clearly suffers from a lack of ingenuity or the artistic presence to take the full-of-possibility premise to a satisfying or, even, an entertaining level. Even Bullock and McMahon seemed subdued or bored at times in their portrayals in this film. As a result, when all is said and done, I feel this film deserves a 4 on the ratings scale for being fair/having a nice idea that wasn't pulled off one bit. Thusly, if it's rated under a 5, it has no chance of being purchased by me, so it also fails the test. To be fair, I probably should have seen that coming.