The Reaping
The Dark Castle production house set up by Robert Zemeckis and Joel Silver was originally in the business of making respectful pastiches of juicy old horror films, but their descent from that lofty ideal now looks complete. When they attempted to be deliberately cheap and gnarly, the result was Paris Hilton in the terminally torpid House of Wax. Now they’ve swung hard in the other direction with no better results. The Reaping is a large scale slice of southern-fried hellfire which has no intention of being a pastiche of anything, and looks like it might actually intend to be frightening.
When Biblical plagues descend on Haven, La., the locals manage to find professional miracle-debunker Hilary Swank and her hulking sidekick Idris Elba in the Yellow Pages, and the pair seeks a logical explanation. The audience is way ahead of them, having already witnessed supernatural occurrences in her ecclesiastical colleague Stephen Rea’s photo album, events which can only point to the involvement of dusty religious prophecies or dusty religious movies.
A certain cheesy nostalgia is desirable for this kind of thing, but The Reaping is resolutely modern and slick. In the hands of director Stephen Hopkins, who’s always displayed a knack for momentum and has plenty of 24 on his resume, The Reaping has the same glossy sheen as a TV thriller. The production values are high, the cinematography is better than the film deserves, and this might be the best river of blood seen in any movie to date. But any sane TV executive would have thrown the story outline into the car park and called for a rewrite. The narrative is all over the place, unable to properly form an Omen reference in its haste to get Rosemary’s Baby squeezed in, while the actors just look on helplessly. None more so than Rea, reduced to occasionally phoning Swank to impart information he could easily have mentioned previously, before being burnt to a crisp amidst cursed satanic documents, the actor’s contract presumably among them.
There’s some fun to be had in the acting, not all of it intentional. David Morrissey, apparently choosing his Hollywood films with the aid of a dart, indicates the Louisiana setting with a comedic accent from the deep south of Mars. But Elba does much more with the sidekick role than it merits before being horribly short changed by the plot, and William Ragsdale turns up briefly, to remind those of us with long memories that Fright Night was a better pastiche than Dark Castle’s entire output. And Swank, in a fetching range of sweaty tops and leading with her cleavage, barrels through the film in a manner which is hard to dislike. Plus she keeps a straight face – no mean feat.
© 2007 Tim Hayes. All rights reserved.
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