The Reaping

The Reaping
Starring: Hilary Swank, David Morrissey, Idris Elba
Directed by: Stephen Hopkins

Style: Demon spawn
Blood and Guts: 2
Fright Factor: 1
Laugh Factor: 1
Weapons of choice: Plagues, knives
Overall rating: 1 out of 5

Katherine Winter (Swank) has made an academic career out of disproving miracles. She and her assistant Ben (Elba) travel the world to find the deeply spiritual and make it mundane. All of this stems from Winter's daughter being sacrificed to lift a curse during a trip to to the Sudan. However, the town of Haven seems to be different. Their entire river turns to human blood, the cattle waste away with no biological explanation, and things only get worse from there. In the center of it all is a girl said to be a demonic child prophesied about in Biblical texts. Katherine must find the answers before the town decides that destroying the girl is the only way to stop the plagues.

This movie feels very rushed, like everyone started working when it was only half-developed, and as a result they have a jumbled mess that they released as a movie. For example, it is about ten minutes into the movie that you get a sense of who these characters actually are. They start off with a priest that has something weird happen to his pictures, then we meet Swank's character but have no idea what she is doing or why. It is only after that scene that she is introduced as a professor at a university studying miracles. Seriously, the beginning was like watching Outbreak.

This entire movie suffers from lazy storytelling. There is no real time for any suspense to be built as all of the plagues come almost on top of each other. They arrive and the river is blood. Next scene, the cows are having trouble. Next scene, the frogs fall from the sky. Also, there is a dream within a dream sequence that is supposed to leave us wondering if it happened but instead leaves us wondering what happened. Many scenes do not really advance a plot more as allow room for metaphors and flashbacks that try poorly to serve as suspense devices.

Meanwhile, all of the characters besides Katherine only have a cursory characterization to them. When the town is riled up and wants to murder the girl, there is never really a sense of danger because we don't really see the town as anything but crazy people who are about to fly off of the deep end. Subsequently, the ending of the film suffers because there is no connection or attachment to anyone. We don't see paranoia brought to a broil. We see people wanting to kill a kid to save their town, and that doesn't hold up for an entire movie.

Finally, there is the ending. I won't give it away, because unlike the movie, I have the ability to respect a surprise. However, the last shot is so hackneyed that I wanted the director to appear in the corner of the screen and wink at us. People need to realize that some hooks are not clever if you do not build the entire story with care.

Overall, this movie commits one of the worst offenses a horror movie can commit: it is dull. Very few scenes hold any interest, including when characters are in danger. It doesn't really offer anything new that we haven't seen in other demonic seed movies, and on top of it all, it thinks it is clever. By the end, I was the one feeling reaped.