If You Think This Movie Looks Bad, Trust Your Premonition

I had a premonition that the movie I went to see with my friend on Friday was not going to be worth our while. Well, it was not so much a premonition as a blatant warning from those who paved the way: "Don't see Premonition. You will waste your money." But if a 9% rating on Rotten Tomatoes didn't warn me off, I guess a spooky dream wasn't likely to dissuade me. After all, I don't see very many movies that leave me wondering how anyone could think that script ought to be acted out and captured on film, so a little bad press just leaves me with the happy anticipation of a rare trashing. Solidly dissing a movie now and then is good for the soul, methinks. Let the cleansing begin.

I like Sandra Bullock. I've found several of her films charming. But others have been disappointing duds. My friend saw and despised The Lake House. "Premonition has to be better than that," she reasoned. I sat back in the half-full theater and waited to see if her prophecy would be fulfilled. I can't say for sure, since I haven't seen The Lake House myself. But I can't see how it could be much more incongruous and inarticulate than this film.

Bullock is Linda Hanson, a woman we first see in a hazy flashback, blissfully happy as her beloved husband Jim (Julian McMahon) surprises her with a beautiful new house. Flash forward several years, and Linda is a world-weary mother of two girls. The older, Bridgette (Courtney Taylor Burness), is 11 or so and somewhat snotty; Megan is around seven and has a very sweet disposition. Both are inconvenienced by Linda's apparent inability to get up early enough to get them to school in a timely fashion, and workaholic Jim seems to have lost all the passion we witnessed in the film's earliest scene.

We don't really find that out until later, though, since all we get of Jim on this day - Thursday - is a cryptic phone message before a sheriff shows up at the door to inform Linda that he died in a car accident the day before. The rest of the day is understandably a haze for Linda, whose mother (Kate Nelligan) comes by to help her deal with the aftermath of this tragic news. But the trouble really begins when she wakes up the next morning. It's Monday, and Jim is still very much alive. It throws her for a loop. She's even more catatonic now than when he was dead, much to the concern of her best buddy Annie (Nia Long). But maybe Jim's death was all just a horrible dream, and maybe there's no significance to the dead crow she accidentally stumbles upon, smearing her hand and the window with blood in one of the movie's grossest scenes.

Alas, when she wakes the next morning, it's Saturday, and Jim is dead again. In fact, it's the day of his funeral, and things are just going from bad to worse for Linda as she discovers that Bridgette has been disfigured with several unsightly scars and her mother and Annie begin to question her mental faculties. Throughout the rest of the movie, it's the same, with Linda bouncing back and forth through the week of her husband's death trying to piece together just what happened to him and why and whether there's any way for her to stop it.

The premise is intriguing. But it really never goes anywhere. When the film ends, we still have no real idea how or why Linda was living in such a non-linear fashion. Evidently it has something to do with the fact that she is spiritually empty, but if she makes enough of an effort she can save her marriage and maybe even her doomed husband. The film's final scene is supposed to be uplifting, heartwarming... something like that. Maybe it is, a little. But only a tiny bit. Mostly, the end of the movie is just like the rest of it: a disappointment.

The acting is decent, I suppose, though Jim and Linda both come across as very bland and mostly emotionless. The girls are cute but never really grab me, and Dr. Roth (Peter Stormare), who Linda turns to for counsel is downright creepy, not to mention condescending. Amber Valletta is reasonably engaging as the enigmatic Claire, while Long is likable and Nelligan's performance is by turns doting and corrosive.

It seems the movie wants to be both a heartwarming romance and a psychological thriller and winds up being neither. The plot holes are glaring. For instance, we see how Bridgette got her scars, but it happens before we first see her, and I'm certain those scars aren't there on that fateful Thursday. We also witness Linda being committed into a mental institution on Saturday, but when the film ends - several months after the week of the crash - there is no explanation whatsoever of how she was released. Nothing seems to add up in this movie, and what answers we do receive always seem to be insufficient.

I suspect that Premonition could have been a good movie. But what I saw was a bleak, cheerless film that seemed like it needed a complete overhaul in order to make any sense or evoke any sincere emotions. It's more than just a hunch; I now am qualified to provide a blatant warning of my own. "Don't see Premonition. You will waste your money." Better luck next time, Sandra.