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Premonition: Frank's Take
01/04/2007 . Source: Frank Ochieng 
Cinematically, says Frank, actress Sandra Bullock is all over the erratic map. One could take this as a positive and progressive move in her film career. She's done it all with inconsistent and uneven results: action-adventures, quirky comedies, romantic comedies, melodramas, ensemble indies, sci-fi thrillers, etc. Clearly, the fortysomething Bullock can proudly point to the fact that she's a versatile performer that can't be pigeonholed in any one particular genre. Buy Premonition in the USA - or Buy Premonition in the UK  The constant knock on Bullock in her humble beginnings was that she was the quintessential "girl-next-store" cinema sweetheart-a title that someone like Meg Ryan held on to before she overstayed her big screen welcome. If anything, Bullock has proven that she has the momentum to undertake any diverse projects that will give her the freedom to weave in and out of creatively. It's too bad that Bullock's filmmaking choices have been misses more than hits as of late.
Curiously, some may feel the need to question Bullock's insistence on trying to make her mark in woefully wooden and wasteful time travelling tales. First, she reunited with her Speed co-star Keanu Reeves in the sparse and drippy The Lake House that explored the tired themes of other dimensions. Now, Bullock is saddled in another dreary and drowsy suspense thriller generically labelled Premonition. Utterly nonsensical, manipulative and mechanically conceived, Premonition is derivative and dour in its superpower silliness. This faceless frightfest begs the only one genuinely true psychological question at large: what prompted Bullock to be drawn to this mindless, moping mystical material?
Screenwriter Bill Kelly's spotty handiwork doesn't leave that much to the imagination. The thinly veiled atmospheric spookiness tries to take on a puzzling and passionate pulse. The calculating twists and turns feels notoriously forced. The movie wants to create a manufactured moodiness that never quite registers in this tepid time-shifting narrative. Yapo's connect-the-dots direction tails off from a logical standpoint and Kelly's trivial script supports the idiotic ramblings that are ludicrous in its incoherent mediocrity. This stilted supernatural snoozer goes through the baseless motions and manages to be as suspenseful as an after-midnight spelling bee contest.
Bullock stars as Linda Hanson, a seemingly content housewife whose husband Jim (Julian McMahon from "The Fantastic Four") and two sweet young daughters are her entire cherished world. All is well in comfy suburbia for Linda-things couldn't be better as far as her sturdy livelihood is concerned. Well, that's until that fateful day when the sheriff comes knocking at the door to inform Linda of hubby Jim's demise (courtesy of a tragic car accident). Feeling understandably numb and disorientated, the grieving Linda's mental health has taken its predictable toll.
Thanks to a restless night of sleep, Linda started hallucinating about her late love. Through a series of bothersome nocturnal episodes, our hazy heroine awakes to remarkably find an alive-and-kicking Jim undergoing his usual morning routine. How can this be? Didn't Jim perish in that treacherous traffic mix-up or what? Soon her strange sleeping patterns begin to play mind games as Linda experiences Jim's mysterious appearances and disappearances-he comes to life one moment then is dead the next-back and forth and so on. Because of Linda's delusional past and futuristic visions concerning Jim she needs some medical attention and quickly!
As Linda cannot seem to shake her traumatized lapses of premonitions the critical events threaten to disturb whatever memories or real life functioning that exists in her tattered psyche. Basically, Linda needs to get it together seeing as though her fractured family's existence is at stake and she's the main key to keeping everything in its proper perspective. First, Linda must conquer her demons and resolve all the lingering static much to the overly concerns of her mother (Kate Nelligan) and trusty best confidant (Nia Long). Secondly, there are incriminating (if not seriously inane) signs of freakish recollections dealing with a dead crow (please don't ask) that's suppose to spark some convenient paranoia into an already murky, brain-damaged creepshow.
The worries pile on for the harried Linda. Awkwardly, she has to dodge the pesky Dr. Norman Roth (Peter Stormare) from overly medicating and institutionalising her before she can tackle the complex clues that may give detail to Jim's suspicious passing. Also Linda is perplexed by the scarring on her older daughter's face and must come to gripes as to whether she's an immediate threat to her offspring given the current crazy conditioning that consumes her unstable soul. Even a number of meetings with a local priest to confront the trickery in her zany symbolic manifestations prove futile.
It's quite evident that Premonition weakly combines the back-and-forth gimmicky flourishes of Groundhog's Day, the eerie aura of The Sixth Sense and the sublime playful cynicism of TV's Desperate Housewives. For a movie that heavily borrows from other notable fare, Premonition botches the zippy effectiveness of these proven showcases. The time skipping elements in this watered-down jigsaw is sloppy and uneventful. Bullock's concocted bizarre intuition twitches are not convincing or intriguing whatsoever.
On the small screen, McMahon (from TV's "Nip/Tick" and "Charmed") can be quite charming and impishly received. Sadly, he's merely used as a cheap device to move along the convoluted plot-nothing more, nothing less. The supporting players-mainly Nelligan, Long and Stormare-are trotted out and contribute meagrely to the miniscule mayhem without enhancing the lustre of this short-handed, shoddy shocker.
Overall, this scattershot scarefest will leave your head scratching with sheer frustration as to why this feeble fright fable entered our consciousness in the first place. As for Ms. Bullock, there's always the safety net of churning out another myopic goose bump entry. Bullock's insistence in languishing in romantic time-twirling thrillers is undeniably exhausting. Perhaps we can next look forward to Premonitions at the Lake House of Congeniality?
Frank Ochieng
© Frank Ochieng 2007
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