This is a direct-to-DVD movie, which has inexplicably attracted a
couple of big stars, but that shouldn't obscure the fact that Zalman
King was knocking out stuff like this back in the 80's. At least those
movies had boobs to distract you from the ridiculous plot: this thing
can only offer Anthony Hopkins' weird hairdo.
Hopkins, in one of his more restrained performances of late, is a psychic who can see people's futures by touching them. Meanwhile Colin Farrell is the killer he's tracking, who's always one step ahead because - gasp - he's psychic too! Sounds like some cheesy fun, right? Except someone decided that this was a Serious Film, dealing with Big Ideas about morality and justice and destiny and fate and stuff, and so everyone looks really dour all the time, no one has any fun, and by my count at least four people get cancer. I'm pretty sure there were less cancer patients in The Fault In Our Stars. And more jokes.
Hopkins and Farrell do their best here, Jeffrey Dean Morgan sleepwalks through it and Abbie Cornish... well, she looks pretty I guess, though to be fair Meryl Streep would have struggled with such a cliché-ridden character, a classic example of a female character written by a man who apparently has never met any real, live women.
The real villain here, though, far worse than Farrell's murderer, is the director. He uses hand-held cameras for no reason, and does so incredibly ineptly, to the extent that I was all but shouting at him to hold the bloody thing still, already. He uses clunky flashbacks and awful symbolism, inserts rubbish montages for no particular reason, and at one point has 77-year-old Anthony Hopkins enact a sequence that looks as though it could be the video to 'Boulevard of Broken Dreams'. In the end, it's only the director's staggering incompetence that you'll remember about this tosh when you catch it on late-night cable in a couple of years' time.
Hopkins, in one of his more restrained performances of late, is a psychic who can see people's futures by touching them. Meanwhile Colin Farrell is the killer he's tracking, who's always one step ahead because - gasp - he's psychic too! Sounds like some cheesy fun, right? Except someone decided that this was a Serious Film, dealing with Big Ideas about morality and justice and destiny and fate and stuff, and so everyone looks really dour all the time, no one has any fun, and by my count at least four people get cancer. I'm pretty sure there were less cancer patients in The Fault In Our Stars. And more jokes.
Hopkins and Farrell do their best here, Jeffrey Dean Morgan sleepwalks through it and Abbie Cornish... well, she looks pretty I guess, though to be fair Meryl Streep would have struggled with such a cliché-ridden character, a classic example of a female character written by a man who apparently has never met any real, live women.
The real villain here, though, far worse than Farrell's murderer, is the director. He uses hand-held cameras for no reason, and does so incredibly ineptly, to the extent that I was all but shouting at him to hold the bloody thing still, already. He uses clunky flashbacks and awful symbolism, inserts rubbish montages for no particular reason, and at one point has 77-year-old Anthony Hopkins enact a sequence that looks as though it could be the video to 'Boulevard of Broken Dreams'. In the end, it's only the director's staggering incompetence that you'll remember about this tosh when you catch it on late-night cable in a couple of years' time.