Premonition (2007)

Rating: D

Dir: Mennan Yapo
Star: Sandra Bullock, Julian McMahon, Nia Long, Shyann McClure

Linda (Bullock) wakes up to find her husband dead. Then wakes up to find him alive again. What the heck is going on? There. That’s this film in 25 words or less. I guess you probably want more; it’s hard to provide more without spoiling it…but, oh, sod it. She’s living a week out of order, hopping forward and backward in time like one of the higher levels of Frogger. Implying there’s much here worth spoiling, probably gives the film more credit than it deserves, as outside of Bullock’s decent performance [which is pretty sympathetic, given all the crap Linda is going through], there really isn’t much. I think the script’s nadir was reached when Linda sat down and drew up a poster-sized chart explaining what was going on: if your story requires anything approaching a Powerpoint presentation, you should probably take a step back and rethink your expository techniques.

There isn’t much sense to speak of, not least in an ending on the day of her husband’s death, as Linda tries frantically to stop what she already knows is going to happen. It’s never made clear whether she then skips three days, or gets to do Thursday-Saturday over again. And, it appears, after the climax, she immediately leaves the scene, since the cops obviously didn’t know she was there when then show up at her house the next day. That departure seems pretty callous to me, given the circumstances [which even I won’t reveal, since it’s one of the few scenes that has any impact]. There’s no explanation attempted for why this is happening to Linda, not even by the Catholic priest who gets wheeled on to offer some spiritual mumbo-jumbo and blame Linda’s lack of faith. It’d take someone much better than Yapo to salvage this mess of illogic and nonsense. Though I am hard pushed to think who that might actually be.