Flatliners (2017) - F-

​Quick Hit: Frankly awful. 

 I’ve taken a long time to try and write this film, because frankly it made me upset at how bad it was. The idea of a Flatliners remake sounded awful, but at one time, Kiefer Sutherland actually floated the idea on the talk circuit that it was a direct sequel. That could have been interesting, but this isn’t at all. It’s the same story as many, many movies that are science-fiction, but also horror – look at Morgan, look at Altered States, Cube, Hellraiser, even Frankenstein, etc – for the basic blueprint. It’s Man tries to do science and finds things out and it gets scary. The end.

Like I said, it could have been good, or at the very least entertaining. Instead it was among the worst things I’ve watched all year. There is nothing that I enjoyed about this movie. It was a complete rehash of the first one, with no new ideas, despite featuring some fairly decent actors (I’m looking at you Ellen Page). 

As far as the plot – same as before. We have a doctor-in-training (Page) who kills herself to see what occurs after death. She has several other doctor-in-training revive her. After she has a trippy experience, she comes back and can remember things. Other doctors than follow her lead. But then spooky things start to happen before they decide that they have to be better people.

Ok, so I was a bit ruffled there, and I used the word “spooky” when really I should have used “jump scares that have absolutely no scare value at all”. The only thing in this movie that was almost scary was the character of Jamie and his scare, which seems to be an infant crawling around within his boat (oh ya, one of the main characters lives on a boat). As far as scares goes, this was a waste of time. The science fiction elements were too – the afterlife consists of people being alone in a world and moving around quickly.
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The soundtrack is terrible, with no scenes that seem to buoy anything up. The acting is sub-par, with characters frequently stating lines with the same amount of surprise as you would expect from someone in a movie like this. When you consider the fact that the movie is a series of repetitions that are played out with the same urgency, I can’t really blame these people. The script is bad, and doesn’t build to anything, so how could you really expect the actors to interject emotion into their lines?

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This movie actively made me mad that I wasted my time to watch it. I’m giving it as low a grade as I can under my grading system, and wish I could go lower. “F-“.

For more on this film, check out IMDB.