Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with a review of the upcoming Sandra Bullock supernatural thriller called PREMONITION. The film doesn't come out until March 2007, but the cut I saw at AFM seemed 100% finished.

I'm starting to get tired of this new fad... There's DEJA VU, there's this film and there's that Taye Diggs TV show that all have elements of this crap that worked great in GROUNDHOG DAY and FREQUENCY, but seems to be sloppily handled these days. In PREMONITION Sandra Bullock plays a housewife who wakes up one morning and has an average day. She takes the kids to school, she does laundry, cleans the house... then gets a sheriff at the door telling her that her husband (Julian McMahon) was killed in a bad car accident.

She mourns, has her horrible day, obviously, and goes to sleep. She wakes up and her husband is alive! She somehow wakes up earlier in the week (which she said she didn't remember any of, by the way) and knows he's going to die. Every time she goes to sleep she jumps from before her husband's death to after his death, alternating.

Alright, interesting idea. But the way they tell this story is both frustrating and deadly slow. The pacing is horrible. The whole film moves at a snail's pace, even the big climax of the film. The frustrating part comes with Bullock's character's approach to this story. She literally sits back and does nothing to convince anyone she knows her husband is going to die. She just keep saying, "Something's wrong... this is wrong... something's wrong."

She has no memory of these days she misses until she revisits them in this supernatural way, so it gets really frustrating to watch her character see signs that lead to bad things she KNOWS are going to happen, but then completely sets them up... knowing that by setting them up, she's putting herself through hell in the future. For example, she sees a psychiatrist (played by the always dependable Peter Stormare) and, knowing that he won't believe her and cart her off to a nut house in the future, tells him all the time jumping she's doing.

On top of all that, the script asks you to buy the conceit that she can jump backwards and forwards in time, but refuses to adhere to any of its own rules. When it begins, she hears about her husband's death on a Thursday, he died on Wednesday (she only hears on Thursday to make a big plot point make sense). When she wakes up in the past, she wakes up on Monday. The next time she wakes up in the past, it's Tuesday. You see a progression, a pattern, and expect them to stick to it. That gives the film a sort of "running-out-of-time" quality, makes every decision Bullock's character makes more and more pressing. You know, good drama.

But they don't stick to that. They jump around, go back to Sunday, for example, just so Bullock can learn a plot point, involving McMahon's pretty co-worker, at that specific point in the movie.

The acting is solid throughout, if uninspired. Bullock's character is frustrating, but she plays the confused, conflicted housewife well. McMahon is good as her husband... certainly worlds better here than in FANTASTIC FOUR. Peter Stormare is only around for a few scenes, but it's always good to see him again. The cinematography is good. The music and music selection is... well, a Sandra Bullock movie music selection.

The ending is really strong and there's a moment involving a tipped casket in the middle of the movie that really made me sit up and go, "Well, this movie might be alright afterall..." but those two moments aren't worth seeking the movie out for. It's completely inoffensive, just dull and bland.

I'm still off work until this weekend, but I had a few AFM reviews already written up, so look out for a couple more to hit in the next couple of days, including a Lionsgate flick that is one of my favorites of the year!

-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com