This movie might appeal to people who like scare themselves by imagining evil threats coming from the supernatural world, angels and demons and things that go bump in the night, but if you're more reality-based than that, you'll probably disappointed. The movie begins as a standard police murder/mystery, and the circumstances of the murders are peculiar enough to gain your interest. Too bad it couldn't have stayed in that realm. Without spoiling the film completely, it's enough to say that once it turned toward the supernatural, it fell completely flat for me. I mean, how can a serious actor like Denzel Washington speak those lines with a straight face? At least Donald Sutherland (who never seems to stop making one movie or another for a single day of the year) was given a part he could play straight without having to spout mumbo-jumbo. John Goodman only had to get himself through a couple of ridiculous lines. But poor Denzel was in the thick of it, pretending to be part of some titanic struggle of good vs. evil. Pshaw! The little twist at the ending was just SO cheesy, lifted from three hundred previous horror flicks; I wanted to spit. Another phony bit borrowed from every horror flick ever made was when Denzel is alone in the basement, scary, scary, suddenly there is a thunderous crash and something huge drops on him from above. Oh, never mind, it was just the old rotting ceiling falling in, nothing to worry about after all. Carry on. We do this in scary movies to keep you from getting bored. Eeyew! I also object to a good deal of the camera work, with all its quick cuts and constant shifting of angle and perspective so that you often don't know what you're looking at. To me that sort of thing is a poor man's substitute for a good script. I gave it five stars instead of less, because the mystery started off as something interesting and because of some of the this-world performances, such as Goodman's and the other cop (played by James Gandolfini, I believe). A movie of limited appeal.
Review of Fallen
