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The Reaping (2007) Warner Brothers 1 hr. 35 mins. Starring: Hilary Swank, David Morrissey, Idris Elba, AnnaSophia Robb, Stephen Rea Directed by: Stephen Hopkins This film is rated: R The Reaping Rating:  
E-MAIL FRANK OCHIENG Two-time Academy Award winner Hilary Swank didn’t receive her golden statuettes by not being pensive. After all, Swank is an adventurous actress and often is consumed by the various interesting roles she effortlessly plays. It’s admirable that Swank looks to delve into different types of projects because she’s a capable performer that has the ability and luxury to do so. Granted she has had her share of hits and misses. Unfortunately, her latest stint in director Stephen Hopkins’s bloated biblical supernatural thriller The Reaping is an inexplicable misstep for the normally revered Swank. Hopkins (HBO’s “Tales from the Crypt” and “The Life and Death of Peter Sellers”), along with the screenwriter tandem of Casey W. Hayes and Chad Hayes, concocts a disjointed religious frightfest that conventionally taps into the goose bump genre with minimal results. Furthermore, The Reaping benefits from taking its cue from other similar frightful fare that have mined the same shock-and-shack sentiments. Uneventfully, moviegoers will immediately recognize snippets from boisterous boofests such as The Exorcist, The Omen, The Exorcism of Emily Rose with a blueprinted touch of Rosemary’s Baby thrown in for recognizable good measure. The Southern-gothic ramblings of The Reaping feel like a pandering pass for a rocky connection between deep fried Christian spirituality and its spook-infected manifestations. The film’s locale, situated in the steamy Louisiana bayou where moodiness and mystery is as plentiful as jugs of moonshine along the shores of a buggy swamp, is crucial when Hopkins tries valiantly to exorcise the delirious demons of his outlandish exposition. All in all, The Reaping relies on that stand-by stunt of cultivating cheap-minded jolting and bolting in the seedy nocturnal atmosphere. There’s nothing refreshingly suspenseful or involving in this misguided shrieking showcase that one hasn’t experienced in other routine schlocky ditties. There’s nothing remotely wrong with The Reaping trying to sensationalize the conception of faith and healing in the backwater background of Hopkins’s creepy canvas. It’s too bad that this cockeyed execution and lack of genuine thrills prevents this toothless eerie entry from establishing some legitimate skeptical forethought about devout Southerner Bible-thumping passages. Granted that by tossing in the biblical plagues (you know the drill...boils, lice, frogs, locusts, etc.) and exploiting the God-fearing tendencies of Mason-Dixon Line denizens, The Reaping strives to capture the alarming allure of backwoods bumpkins and their missionary practices. The only striking irony (and distinction) about The Reaping is its release date in the shadows of the Passover/Easter holiday. Shamelessly incoherent, overwrought and saturated with thematic mumble-jumble religious-minded overtones, Hopkins’s Exodus-inspired narrative doesn’t quite “reap” what it sows so ridiculously. Former minister Katherine Winter (Swank) is now a college professor at Louisiana State University specializing in the skepticism of religious fanaticism. Katherine’s indifferent stance toward accepting “miracles” shaped her cynicism early on when her beloved family perished in the bloodshed boundaries of the Sudan. Thus, she spends her time lecturing emphatically about the nonsensical whimsical effects of religious scripture. Katherine is challenged when the community of Haven, LA starts to experience weird happenings when the town’s river turns into blood. Also, a child had died mysteriously and the region is hopelessly bombarded by the aforementioned out-of-control biblical plagues. Katherine, along with her assistant Ben (Idris Elba from “Daddy’s Little Girls”), is invited by inquisitive science teacher Doug Blackwell (David Morrissey) to act as a miracle debunkers in investigating the conflicted town’s erratic, creepy phenomenon. The Haven residents are pointing their convincing fingers at a suspicious little girl named Loren (AnnaSophia Robb) as the cause for God’s wrath immensely beleaguering the area. They summarized that Loren is “evil personified” in the wake of her killing a boy just before the river’s contents turned bloody red. In the meantime, Father Costigan (Stephen Rea) is very concerned from a distance about Katherine’s safety as she delves deeper into the chaotic corrosion facing her in the troubled territory of the freaky Louisiana woods-infested hamlet. With the caustic signs of despair that pop up in ominous fashion, the frazzled priest warns Katherine of her imperiled predicament. The imminent danger, according to Costigan, will graduate to more destruction that’s surely indescribable. Will Katherine and Ben figure out Haven’s catastrophic occurrences? What exactly is Loren’s sordid connection with God’s perceived outrage that is fixated in the minds of the town’s judgmental citizens? Can Haven’s tumultuous display of rotting fish and keeled over cows finally make a cynic such as Katherine believe in the Higher Power? How many more warnings will Father Costigan receive to signify the progression of Katherine’s quest for the scary truth? Basically, The Reaping purports to promote a feasible kind of hallelujah-driven hysteria pitted within the Christian-oriented crevices of the Bible Belt Deep South. The faulty execution by Hopkins only deems this hollow horror show as a cliched spook-induced spectacle riddled with synthetically small-scale grotesque grindings. Empty-headed in its bombastic approach, the shock value feels relentlessly mechanical. The usage of flashback sequences to explain the traumatic nuances of Swank’s Katherine and Robb’s Loren have no definable edginess or urgency besides being a convenient device to revisit and remind the audience of their surfacing angst. Swank has been trapped in iffy fodder before (witness “The Core”, “The Affair of the Necklace” and “The Black Dahlia”) where her miscasting has been questioned. However, in The Reaping, Swank looks rather bewildered, bored and uncomfortable in a meager role that doesn’t have much depth or layers of stimulating intrigue. The material wants to be high-minded and complex but fails miserably as the protruding proceeding meanders into pointless countrified hocus pocus propaganda. Let’s face it, folks...The Reaping is one eerie cinematic Easter ham that will be tough to swallow. Click here to comment on this review or post your own thoughts. Frank Ochieng © TheWorldJournal.com |
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