Posted by
Emmett of the Unblinking Eye on Wednesday, April 04, 2007 1:32:18 PM
One of my favorite Warner Bros. Cartoons has two mice who break intoa cheese factory and absolutely gorge themselves. In fact, they eat so much that they can't look at a piece of cheese again, and figure that they have nothing else to live for, so they decide to sacrifice themselves to Sylvester the cat. Sylvester, in turn, can't believe that they really want him to eat them, that they must be poisoned, and that if he can't eat mice,
he has nothing left to live for. So he tries to feed himself to the bulldog. This, of course, confuses the bulldog, who proceeds to pull out his old tape adding machine. "Let's see", says the bulldog, "Mice won't eat cheese", and he pulls the handle (
kerchunk). "Mice want cat to eat them" (
kerchunk). "Cat won't eat mice" (
kerchunk). "Cat wants dog to eat him" (
kerchunk). So the bulldog pulls out the tape, looks at what's on it, looks at the audience and says "It just don't add up!"
Which brings us to
The Reaping. Now,
Hilary Swank does her ususal professional acting job playing a former Christian missionary/pastor who has lost her faith and now spends her LSU professorship debunking claims of miracles. However, when the representative of the small back-bayou town of Haven (well played by
David Morrissey) comes to her to investigate a river that has apparently turned to blood, things start getting a little creepy. As the perceived plagues escalate, the town seeks to blame a backwoods 12 year old (played by Dakota Fanning wannabe
AnnaSophia Robb) whose older brother has been mysteriously killed.
And this is where things get both creepy
and muddled. I don't want to give away the plot, but by the end of the movie it is pretty clear that if one character had actually opened her yap and told Ms. Swank what in the world was going on, rather than simply standing and staring for 7/8ths of the movie, all would have been revealed. And it sure would have helped me out, because I'm still a little perplexed as to who, exactly, are the bad guys and what, exactly, Ms. Robb was supposed to be.
But their is no question that despite its considerable scritpign flaws,
The Reaping is blessed with decent acting, has its fair share of scares and some very good special effects, but never seems to make it to the realm of the truly frightening.