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COUNTDOWN (2019)
Director: Justin Dec Cast: Elizabeth Lail, Jordan Calloway, Talitha Bateman, Peter Facinelli, Tichina Arnold, P.J. Byrne, Tom Segura, Dillon Lane, Anne Winters, Matt Letscher, Valente Rodriguez MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:30 Release Date: 10/25/19 |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 25, 2019 Countdown cheats early and often. The best sequence is the movie's first, which is never a good sign. The worse sign, though, is that the ending of that sequence announces how poorly writer/director Justin Dec has decided to treat a decent idea for a horror movie. Basically, there's a cellphone app that tells each user when he or she will die. We first follow a young woman, who downloads the eponymous application, which tells her, with a ticking clock, that she has about three hours to live. There's some effective tension in this scene, because Dec teases us with the unknown—the question of whether or not the app is accurate (Of course it is, obviously, or there'd be no movie) and the mystery of what will happen when that timer reaches zero. Just as the countdown is about to reach zero, though, the movie establishes, with an explosion of supernatural force upon the character, that this is just going to be a generic scare machine. The app doesn't just tell a person when they're going to die. With the help of a curse written into its programming (Seriously, that's the background for the app), an actual demon simply kills the user when their time is up—usually by invisibly tossing them upwards and letting gravity do the work. The central protagonist is Quinn (Elizabeth Lail), a newly appointed nurse at a hospital, who downloads the app and learns she has about two days to live. The rest of the movie—which fits in a similarly doomed sidekick in the form of Matt (Jordan Calloway), a kid sister (played by Talitha Bateman) who's going to die just before Quinn, a sarcastic cellphone expert (played by Tom Segura), and a priest (played by P.J. Byrne) who's really, really into demon lore—has the characters trying to figure out what's happening and how to stop it. Mostly, though, it's just an excuse for multiple scenes in which ghosts and a demon (in a cloak, in disguise, or as a generic, yellow-eyed monster) pop into frame with the usual loud noise on the soundtrack. The potential tension of Countdown is weakened at the end of the prologue, when we realize Dec's intentions can't even approach the cleverness of the core concept. From there, the movie just becomes a parade of jump scares and general silliness. Copyright © 2019 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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(for terror, violence, blood images, suggestive material, language and
thematic elements)
