If you're up for a flick with less cinematic integrity than a mid-afternoon segment of C-SPAN, equal in the amounts of fear it invokes from viewers, make sure to check out the newly released "suspense thriller" The Reaping, directed by Stephen Hopkins.
You can let the quotations speak for themselves. The only time this movie lives up to its formal classification is when you're waiting for a fight to break out between the usher and the guy on his cell phone during one of the many poorly-orchestrated climaxes.
Judging by the rest of the small audience's comings and goings during the entire 118 minutes of the film, I think it's fairly safe to say that Hopkins bit off more than he could chew.
Hilary Swank, who plays a university professor and ex-missionary, is called into a rural and God-fearing town fittingly known as "Haven." There, she attempts to uncover the biological rationale behind occurrences that resemble modern-day versions of the 10 biblical plagues.
Mystery evolves into horror when Swank and her colleague (Idris Elba) discover that the mysterious events are anything short of natural. Without the tangible means to defeat the evil force behind the plagues, Swank is forced to rekindle her sense of faith to combat them. But you can rest assured that this scary-sounding plot does a better job of resembling a comedy than a horror flick.
More entertaining than the plot itself is Swank's uncanny ability to remain completely devoid of emotion in even the most emotionally-demanding moments. I have never felt as unaffected by any other scene in a movie as I did when I watched Swank give a dull, half-hearted glance towards the ground as she talked about her family being ruthlessly murdered. In a similarly emotionless scene, Swank lets out an unconvincing sigh to complement her partially teary-eyed reaction to the death of her friend just moments after his brutal and highly unexpected murder.
Swank's poorly executed emotional cues were highly impressive in their consistency throughout the film. Additionally, the extreme contrast between Swank's lack of passion and the overly-dramatic orchestral soundtrack, similar to those that you would find in a Hitchcock film, served as an additional aid in accentuating her acting mishaps. Only, the feelings invoked by the most intense scenes in The Reaping were nowhere near the level of anxiety I experienced when I first saw the hundreds of crows lining the telephone cables in The Birds.
In short, The Reaping met every criterion necessary for a typical movie of its genre, with the exception of the most important one: acting good enough to convince you, even for a fraction of a second, that what you're watching could possibly be real.
So go ahead, catch some C-SPAN. Chances are you'll get more thrill out of monotone senatorial speeches than Hollywood's stale attempt to portray the return of the 10 biblical plagues in The Reaping.
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