Overall Rating
  Awesome: 9.89%
Worth A Look: 7.69%
Just Average: 6.59%
Pretty Crappy: 38.46%
Sucks: 37.36%
9 reviews, 37 user ratings
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| Reaping, The |
by Dawn Taylor
"It's no worse than being plagued by frogs or boils, just less fun."
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Has there ever been a good movie about Biblical prophecy? Seriously. No … “The Exorcist” doesn’t count. That was a devil movie, and they’re a whole different thing altogether. The truth is, movies about Biblical prophecy always suck, and “The Reaping” isn’t any different.It starts off with some promise, despite having all the hallmarks of a bad Hollywood product packaged by agents and studio flacks. Hillary Swank plays Katherine Winter, an ex-minister who now debunks “miracles” using science. Yes, science! Hillary Swank is a minister AND a scientist! She lost her faith because her husband and daughter were killed as a sacrifice to the rain gods when they were all on a mission in Africa! No, I’m not making this up. Please, stop laughing.
Katherine gets a visit from a fellow named Doug (David Morrissey) who’s looking for help with a little Bible-style plague problem that they’re having in the backwater burg of Haven, Louisiana. Morrissey, a sort of bargain-basement Liam Neeson, takes the theatrical road that most Irish/Scottish/English actors do when playing characters from the American South – he continues to speak in his native accent, on the assumption that the audience is too stupid to tell the difference between an Irish brogue and Hillbilly Hick.
So anyway. The river of blood turns out, to Katherine’s astonishment, to really be a river of blood. Then toads fall from the sky. And people get boils. And all the townsfolk insist that it’s the fault of the requisite horror-flick Creepy Little Girl (AnnaSophia Robb) and so they tell Katherine and her associate Ben (Idris Elba) that the girl needs to be killed. As scientists, Katherine and Ben think this is a tad extreme. Oh, did I mention that Ben’s a black man? Do you think that he’ll be dead before the film’s over?
Stephen Rea’s also in The Reaping as a priest pal of Katherine’s who calls her up on the phone a couple of times to say, “Katherine, I think you’re in danger!” before he, too, dies a dramatic and pointless death. Wow, talk about phoning it in. I mean, literally.
The tenth plague, according to the prophecy, is the “death of the firstborn,” so if you don’t figure out what’s happening as soon as Doug tells Katherine that he “comes from a long-line of only children” and the useless character who we’ll call Talkative Pregnant Lady says that she doesn’t give a damn whether her soon-to-be second child is a boy or a girl … well, then you’re as retarded as The Reaping and you deserve to lose however much you paid for a ticket to this piece of crap.It’s not suspenseful enough to be a thriller or scary enough to be a horror film, and its pop-psych, rudimentary approach to faith and grief is about as deep as a Jesus on the Cross paint-by-numbers set. In fact, the whole thing is pretty insulting, stealing as it does from so many other movies that we’ve all seen before, and not even doing that well. Bleh.
link directly to this review at https://www.hollywoodbitchslap.com/review.php?movie=15612&reviewer=413
originally posted: 04/06/07 18:22:19
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USA
05-Apr-2007 (R)
DVD: 16-Oct-2007
UK
N/A
Australia
19-Apr-2007
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