SLIDER

Film Friday: Rings


source/imdb


Guys, Rings is awful.
As in, this is the worst movie I'm reviewing since starting Film Friday. It's a special type of bad. 
The Ring, I think we can all agree, was awesome. (71% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which I think is a bit low, but not terrible.)  The Ring Two is stupid and tends to drag until the awkward do-the-rules-still-actually-apply? ending, but it's enjoyable. It has a 20% Rotten Tomatoes rating, and that's about accurate. But what The Ring Two has that this film doesn't is the laughability factor. Watching it, I chuckle to myself, thinking "you dumb shit." Ha ha, lol.

And then this movie with its 6% Rotten Tomatoes rating happened.
Oi.

There are a lot of failures within this movie, but I'm going to focus on the main ones.

1.) The opening scene is utterly superfluous, and the minor scene that connects the jammed-in opening sequence to the rest of the film is lazy and expositional at best. I can just see a group of asshat producers and/or writers  - (a total of 6 writing credits on this piece of shit, folks. Six. One for the original Ringu dude, two are for "story by" and three are for "screenplay by") - sitting in a room saying "You know what would look really cool? If this happened. . . " And then it was like "we absolutely must find a way to ram this sequence in, so make it happen. Also? It did not look cool, it looked dumb.

2.) Our "heroes" are just the worst.  Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz {oi} and Alex Roe  appear to have attended the Bella Swan school of acting. Their characters, Julia and Holt, are...to put it lightly, criminally boring, and while the script doesn't give them much to work with, they don't bring much of anything, either.
Let me put it this way: there is a scene which involves a car accident with a telephone pole and both of our "heroes" are on-screen the entire time. I realized after the scene was done that I had been paying attention to the telephone pole; it was more interesting. I wish that was an exaggeration. I had been totally focused on the pole for the whole scene.
Guys, I've got to be perfectly honest: I've seen better performances out of cheese.

source

3.) ALSO: Holt and Julia are the dumbest characters I have seen in a horror movie since I Know What You Did Last Summer - and those characters were epic on the stupidity scale. Everybody is familiar with the concept of Chekov's Gun, yes? Well, it works both ways. What I mean is that, if someone is going to be saved by their mad swimming skills, you need to show they are a good swimmer somewhere in the beginning - preferably with some measure of subtlety. If a gun is hanging on the wall, the gun better go off later, or it's unnecessary.
Conversely, if a character DOESN'T do something that is the "why wouldn't you just..." - there better be an explanation. WHY didn't the teenager in the woods just get in the car and drive away? Oh, the lights were left on and the battery died? Well, shit. WHY didn't our hero just go hide in the panic room until the killer got bored and left? - We know from something in the first scene that he is deeply claustrophobic, so it makes sense he wouldn't do that.
<<<Establishing character traits and why someone would/could/wouldn't/couldn't is displayed particularly well in the movie Marathon Man, if you're interested.>>>
THIS MOVIE THROWS CHEKOV'S GUN OUT THE WINDOW.
Holt, especially, is guilty of doing and not doing things that are A.) Counter-intuitive to what we understand to be his nature, and B.) ANY normal human being would do, but he just . . . doesn't.
(If you want to know more , you can click here.)

Le sigh. This movie suffers from shoehorned scenes, flat acting, dumb ass characters, breaking the rules of its own universe, poor cinematography, predictability, bad lighting, uneven pacing, and random just "what the hell are you doing?-ness".


F

Heads Up:  I don't remember much to be warned about. Violence, I guess. Swearing, maybe? Girl in her underwear. Bad writing. Wooden dialogue.
 
Available HERE








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