Flatliners

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SPOILER FREE REVIEW

     Remakes and reboots are all the rage these days, and here to capitalize on that trend is Flatliners, a remake of the 1990 film of the same name. The film centers around a group of med school students who conduct a series of experiments designed to explore what happens to the brain and consciousness after death… by allowing themselves to die for several minutes at a time before being resuscitated at the last second. Unsurprisingly, the experiments unleash a range of unexpected side effects that threaten to reveal their secret and possibly claim their lives for good.

     Julia Roberts, Kevin Bacon, and Kiefer Sutherland starred in the 1990 iteration, but this time it’s Ellen Page and Diego Luna who lead the cast as Dr. Courtney Holmes and med student Ray, respectively. They work alongside Nina Dobrev, James Norton, and Kiersey Clemons, each of whom play other med students involved in the experiments.

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     Let’s cut to the chase: Flatliners is profoundly dumb, as anyone who has seen a trailer for the film could probably have guessed. Billed as a supernatural, psychological horror film, the movie doesn’t work on any level, and frankly, it’s not interesting or unintentionally funny enough to treat like Sharknado or some other B-movie. It’s just bad.

     Where to cast the blame? Let’s start with story. The movie’s premise is already pretty silly, so the script has some heavy lifting to do in terms of making it believable or even remotely plausible—something the movie doesn’t seemed concerned with doing in the slightest. With little effort put into rationalizing things, the plot comes off as absurd, the stakes arbitrary, the motivations inexplicable, the characters stupid and unlikeable.

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     Ostensibly a horror film at heart, Flatliners waits a questionably long time before it attempts to introduce anything scary. Even then, there are very few decent scares and quite a few lousy ones, mostly with a distinctly impersonal, Final Destination-y vibe. As if that wasn’t enough, the movie switches gears halfway through into “cautionary tale” mode, due to the fact that somehow—it’s never approached, not to mention explained—their experiments are coming back to haunt them and demand recompense for past sins. I suppose you could consider it a metaphor for how death/mortality puts things in perspective, but coming from such obnoxious, idiotic, and inexplicably wealthy characters, the moral has no weight.

     Flatliners has B-movie writing, with frequently embarrassing dialogue and poor scene construction. It puts characters in ridiculous places, doing things that don’t ring true and citing implausible motivations. That might not be quite so devastating if, like a good B-movie, Flatliners would own up to and appreciate its own stupidity, but nope: it’s entirely serious, entirely for real, and entirely unfunny.

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     The problem’s augmented by bad acting, which is a recurrent issue throughout the movie’s runtime. Not everyone is guilty; Page, Luna, and Norton perform reasonably well, but it’s painful to see them try to salvage such a botched script. The rest of the cast (including Kiefer Sutherland, who makes an appearance!) struggle to make sense of their roles. Without a solid talent base, Flatliners stumbles early and never recovers.  

     FINAL VERDICT: Disastrous movies can still be fun to watch when they’re disastrous in an “explosive train wreck” kind of way. Flatliners is disastrous in a “the ice caps are steadily melting” kind of way. 

Watch the trailer here. 

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