Premonition |
  • Canada • 2005 • 86m •   • Directed by: Jonas Quastel. • Starring: Casper Van Dien, Catherine Oxenberg, Kyle Jordon Drewitz, Doug Abrahams, Lorena Gale, Earl Pastko, Colin Lawrence, Philip Granger, David Palffy, John Tench, Michael Derbas, Teri Lee Sampson, Beverley Knight. • Music by: John Sereda.      After a violent car wreck nearly takes his life, Detective Jack Barnes begins having inexplicable and terrifying premonitions of horrible disasters. At first his warning calls go unheeded, but as the premonitions begin to come true Jack is shocked to find himself wanted for questioning by the FBI. He goes on the run, narrowly avoiding both the FBI and a band of terrorists on the verge of unleashing a deadly attack. As he scrambles to unlock the meaning of the visions, he must race against the clock to stop the terrorists before they can strike again.
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Review:
The year 2004 gave us this one, "Premonition," preceded by a short titled "Premonition" to be followed in 2007 by a film called "Premonition." How to evaluate this? It isn't that it's budget was low. You can do a lot within strictly circumscribed financial limits. It's that every opportunity for originality or any expression of artistry is by-passed in favor of the commercially routine. It's predictable without distinction.
Right off the bat, we know something is wrong. We see a gang of hoods shoot a security guard and deface a meat-packing plant, spraying the walls with chicken blood graffiti -- "MEAT IS MURDER" and whatnot. The police put this down as ecoterrorism. (It's an interesting word, ecoterrorism, with a semantic content equal to what logicians call a null set. The category is empty.) Well, we know darn well that this rough-speaking, violent gang isn't made up of rabid vegetarians because half the Hollywood celebrities are themselves vegetarians. Man, is that a red herring. But don't get me wrong. I eat a lot of vegetables myself. Not that I like the way they taste. I hate it. But I enjoy boiling them alive or eating them while still turgid.
Anyway the gang is pursued by a pair of cops in a car chase. What would a movie be without a car chase. The cops have an accident. One of them is killed and is partner is clinically dead but then revived. Thereafter he has what he calls "visions" of future events, all catastrophes, which he goes about trying to prevent.
The gang members meanwhile find out that the hero survived and set out to kill him because "he knows too much." This makes as much sense as anything else in the film. All the surviving cop knows is what kind of car he was chasing, and he's already described it, and anyway the car was found abandoned and "sanitized" shortly after the raid. So in fact, he doesn't "know too much" at all. He knows nothing that would endanger the gang and their nefarious plans (which have nothing to do with vegetarianism, not even ovo-lacto-vegetarianism). I'll just say that the cop's visions cause him trouble at home and that nobody on the force or in the FBI believe him. The FBI would love to pin all the catastrophes -- the ones he's tried to prevent -- on the cop. Not for any particular reason. They'd just like to do it. The cop at least doesn't have to hand over his gun and his badge as so many suspect cops have to do -- at least not before I switched channels.
The gang members are interesting. They provide a good example of what I meant when I said every opportunity for originality was thrown away. They're all ugly and pure evil. They speak with Russian accents, which is getting pretty tiresome. The chief hood demonstrates what true commitment to the cause looks like. He smiles and pats his oldest and dearest friend on the back, then deliberately shoots him through the head. "See?", he explains to an awestruck observer, "this man was truly devoted -- willing to die for the cause, although he didn't know it." (I'm serious about that last line. I think it's verbatim.) Oh how EASY it would have been to make this a more adult film. Give the villain with the pock-marked face a personality. Give him some aficion. Give him a weakness for macramé or something. Have him be an avid collector of cowrie shells.
And the actors. Next time can we get some who rise above the level of afternoon dramas? I guess the cop is handsome inasmuch as he looks as if he ought to be modeling thousand-dollar sports jackets in the Times Magazine but he's not much of an actor. I thought Catherine Oxenberg would be but she doesn't quite clear the banality bar either. Nor are she and the hero alone. One actor, the guy who has visions like the hero's, speaks as if he's used to doing voice overs for aspirin commercials, though his face is a good one for the screen.
You have to have sympathy for people trying to do a complicated job on a pittance. But why strain and creak to reach for the routine when there may be jewels at your feet?
Review by rmax304823 from the Internet Movie Database.
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