Is Premonition the Lamest Movie Ever? Probably not, given its myriad competitors for the dubious title, but damn if it doesn’t work hard—through not working hard at all—at setting some sort of record for dreary ridiculousness. The second straight Sandra Bullock vehicle involving time-travel (after The Lake House), Mennan Yapo’s “thriller” concerns a housewife named Linda Hanson who, upon learning that husband Jim (Julian McMahon) has died in a car accident, finds her brain (and grasp on reality) going all scrambled-eggy. Mysteriously hopping back and forth between the past and the future via sleep, Linda soon realizes that to save her hubby, avoid being institutionalized by lithium-proscribing Dr. Roth (Peter Stormare), and prevent her younger daughter from scarring her face, she’s got to piece together a series of clues to Jim’s death that, to put it mildly, make no sense. One day, Linda trips out back by the billowing sheet-adorned clothesline and lands on a dead crow; later, on an earlier day, she sees the sparkly lightning that killed the creature. What does this random bird have to do with Jim’s demise? Not a thing, but that doesn’t stop Yapo, working from Bill Kelly’s inane script, from treating it and every other non-event like a harbinger of doom, the director’s main stylistic flourish being to punctuate his torpid scenarios with low, sinister whooshing noises. A barely-trying Bullock affects anxious dismay while haphazardly running around trying to make sense of her topsy-turvy new life, which she accomplishes after a local priest, who reads from a handy book of stories about people who’ve seen the future, enlightens her with nuggets of wisdom like “History’s full of unexplained phenomena” and “Nature abhors a vacuum, even a spiritual one.” That the root cause of her situation is (spoiler alert!) unidentified cosmic (religious?) forces proves about as pathetic an explanation as was The Forgotten’s use of aliens to account for the inexplicable. Such unimaginativeness, however, still doesn’t prepare one for the mind-bogglingly meaningless final image—a bit of “one door closes, another door opens” nonsense to cap off a fiasco that should serve as a forewarning to Bullock about her (already mediocre) career’s downward trajectory.
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