I've Seen It All Before (Premonition (DVD))

Name: plipplop

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Product:	Premonition (DVD)
Date:	09/07/07 (130 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: I love the design of the DVD cover

Disadvantages: It's a confusing mess

When Jim Hanson tells his wife that he has a surprise for her, she is ill-prepared for the shock to come. Confronted by a new dream home, Lynda couldn't be happier and in the years that follow, she and Jim live happily with their two young children.

Waking to an apparently normal day, Lynda kisses goodbye to her husband as he leaves for work and takes the children to school. She completes her usual chores and potters around in the kitchen, preparing for her family to come home. But Lynda's world is about to come crashing down around her; a knock at the door bringing terrible news. Her husband has been tragically killed in a car accident. That evening, unable to cope with the burden of her grief, Lynda's mother quickly comes to her aid, and whilst her mother tends to the children Lynda falls asleep on the couch.

When Lynda wakes the following morning, it is indeed a different day. As she trudges sombrely down the stairs, she is startled by a figure watching television in the kitchen. She can barely believe her eyes. It's Jim; alive and well. His death must surely have been a terrible nightmare?

Sadly, for Lynda the nightmare has only just begun……

Look out; it's one of those dodgy supernatural mysteries again. In the true timeless Hollywood fashion, director Mennan Yapo (no I hadn't heard of him before either) re-ignites the seemingly endless appetite for tales about people who die, come back and die again. The only difference with Premonition is that it happens every day.

Faced with the decision over whether to make Premonition scary, intriguing or exciting, Yapo largely wimps out on all three. That desperate need to retain a family-friendly 12a certificate pretty much eliminates the possibility of the scary option, and with such a confusing screenplay, numbers two and three are discontinued fairly early on in the proceedings too. At best, there are times in Premonition when things are mildly exciting. At worst, they're utterly confusing and completely uninteresting.

Lynda's ordeal is told through a confusing patchwork of cross-continuity scenes that roughly span the period of a fortnight. As Lynda soon points out to a mother utterly convinced she is mad, one day Jim's dead, and the next day he isn't. If only it were that simple. For Lynda, it's not just a question of whether he's dead or not; all sorts of other chronology goes berserk. One day, she's confronted by her young daughter having suffered terrible cuts to her face for no obvious reason; the next day she's back to normal. One day, there's a dead crow in the bin; the nest day there isn't. The scale of the ordeal is clearly unimaginable (sarcasm intended) and as Lynda starts to wonder whether she's losing her marbles, the audience quickly follows suit.

All the expected responses and clichés are thrown in from the outset. Cross-continuity is in itself now becoming rather tired with every director under the sun believing that he / she can emulate Christopher Nolan's astounding Memento film and failing miserably. It goes without saying that everyone thinks Lynda's a complete loon, and in true Hollywood fashion she's soon carted off to the loony-bin as quickly as a real world might prescribe a mild sedative. There's a rather creepy doctor (Dr Ruth, no, really!) who threatens to know more than he's letting on and when all else fails, you can always rely on a hand-wringing priest to believe everything he's told without so much as a twitch. Trying to keep up is often quite hard work; when Lynda starts to find herself writing everything down to keep track of things, you've half a mind to ask her to pass out a copy for your own benefit.

If you're expecting an astounding twist, you'll probably be disappointed, given only that as soon as a supporting cast member turns up on the scene, it becomes pretty clear what's going on. The climax to the film is not entirely unwelcome and certainly doesn't deliver the outcome that I might have predicted. It is, however, still rather silly given the preceding events. It's hard to swallow that after such harrowing experiences of time continuity issues, Lynda wouldn't have more of her wits about her. Largely, there's more intrigue / pleasure to be derived from spotting things in each scene that have / haven't yet happened and working out when they will / have happened. Confused? You probably will be. But writer Bill Kelly isn't. His previous film was Blast from the Past, another romantic time-switching tale about a guy emerging from a nuclear bunker. His next outing is Enchanted, essentially more of the same. Let's hope they don’t get any more complicated.

Premonition's two leads are a strange mixture. Sandra Bullock (an actress I find increasingly likeable in serious roles) is convincingly desperate as Lynda tries to find a way to stop her husband dying. Bullock injects a fair mount of energy into the role, which often seems to fizzle out amidst a rather weak story. Julian McMahon is normally fairly convincing too, but here he never really comes to much given the distinct lack of chemistry between him and Bullock. The kids are likeable but non-descript; the mother is suitably concerned but nobody really seems convinced.

I certainly wasn't. Had the story been based around a simple dream / premonition and the implications of the leads doing their best to change fate, there was always a danger that the film would simply become another Final Destination. But the finished product STILL feels like a re-hash of the Final Destination concept, minus the bloodshed. Fans of supernatural / suspense films will be disappointed to find that this is much more of a "weepie" than a shocker.

Not recommended

The UK DVD is released on July 16th.

Summary: More of the same in the "avert the future" chiller premise