Just in time for Passover, Easter, and/or any other equinoctial festival on your liturgical calendar comes THE REAPING, an abomination of a film to put the fear of God in us all with its sheer awfulness. Then again, one can with some merit ponder why an all-knowing Being would allow such as this to happen. I leave it to cooler theological heads to tackle that one.
Such a cooler head would seem to be on the shoulders of Katherine Winter (Hilary Swank), a professional miracle debunker and lapsed cleric. An unfortunate incident in the Sudan killed her faith and her family. It also left her wanting little to do with Father Costigan (Stephen Rea). And so it is odd that when God or someone sends a warning about Katherine being in danger it is to the good Father. This being a film about the supernatural, the warning comes in the form of fire, specifically, Katherine’s face flaming out of every photo that Father Costigan has of her. That a priest would be hoarding so many photos of a comely young woman is never addressed. That he is a man with time on his hands is in that he takes the time to arrange all the singed photos so that the burns make a pattern. Naturally, he calls to warn her about the upside-down scythe he found. Naturally, she doesn’t believe him. Fate being what it is, the call all but coincides with a visit from Doug (David Morrissey from the nightmare that was BASIC INSTINCT 2). He’s a beleaguered resident of the equally beleaguered small town of Haven, situated a few hours drive from Louisiana State University where Katherine teaches something, but we’re not told what exactly even though we do sit in on part of a class. It seems that the local river has turned blood-red and rather than involve the media and the attendant publicity it would generate, he has come to Katherine and her faithful cohort, Ben (Idris Elba), to do their miracle-busting, find a logical explanation, and save the little girl that the angry townsfolk are blaming for the anomaly.
Of course she’s not suspicious. Of course they trek out to the middle of nowhere. Of course the river really has turned to blood, but they don’t find that out until later because despite all the scientific equipment that they’ve schlepped along, the can’t look at the sample of river water under their own microscope and see the blood cells. It just gets worse as each of the biblical plagues of the Exodus visits Haven in quick succession and the correct sequence. Case in point, Katherine does a precise and logical rundown of what non-supernatural forces caused those plagues and mentions that they happened in Cairo, a town that wouldn’t exist for a few centuries after the fact.
Maybe it’s because I grew up partly next to a levee in New Orleans that the sight of bloated frogs and a cloud of locusts doesn’t do much in the way of scaring me. It’s just another spring in bayou country. You want to strike terror, try a swarm of the six-inch roaches that fly at you and don’t necessarily die when you step on them. Even without that background to fall back on, though, the plagues, like the flick as a whole, is laid out in such a garbled and lugubrious fashion that it comes across as significantly less terrifying than a program on the nature channel about life in the swamps. Trust me, a swamp possum with an attitude, and most of them have one, is more than a match for the dyspeptic bull that gores a truck in which Katherine is riding. It’s as though the languor and oppressive heat of and humidity of Louisiana have infested the film itself and not in a good way.
Add a wooden rather than feisty performance from Swank as someone who wanders alone into spooky old shacks not once, but twice and the second time after being convinced of the infernal goings on. Add a performance from Rea that is literally phoned in. He never appears with any of the other principal cast members, instead he is relegated to one-sided phone conversations and reacting to third-string special effects that look like they were the rejected from both versions of the EXORCIST prequels. Idris Elba rises above the material as the religious skeptic with a mordant sense of humor, but AnnaSophia Robb (so good in BRIDGE TO TERABITIA), as the requisite weird, possibly demon, child is more sulky than spooky with just a dash of what may be the effects of ritalin.
THE REAPING drags on interminably through all the plagues and then adds a new one. The twist ending that everyone can see coming, borrowing, and without any pizzazz, as it does from a variety of sources such as ROSEMARY’S BABY, THE WICKER MAN, and THE OMEN. This is a retread that is tired coming out of the gate that succeeds only in exhausting its audience with its ineptitude and unintentional humor.
Your Thoughts?