The Reaping

Question: What do you get when you mix two-time Academy Award winning actress Hilary Swank, zero-time Academy Award nominee David Morrissey (Basic Instinct 2), and Stephen Hopkins, the acclaimed director of Predator 2, Lost in Space, and A Nightmare on Elm Street 5?

Answer: The Reaping

Remember the trailer where Hilary Swank opens a door and everything in sight is covered in locusts? The one where a lady asks, “Are you going to kill my baby?” and Hilary responds, “No” and the lady says, “Why not?” That trailer tells you everything you need to know about The Reaping. Bad effects, lame dialogue, pointless story. Hilary Swank plays a supposed skeptic; she’s a scientist that travels the world debunking miracles and magical happenings and such. Before she was a scientist/skeptic, she was a religious woman. Her daughter died and she turned her back on god but god didn’t turn his back on her. No, no, no. Skeptics beware. God is watching you and doesn’t appreciate your evil faith-debunking behavior.

Hilary Swank’s character, Katherine Winter (she’s cold because she gave up the warm glow of the Christian God), is called upon to investigate some strange happenings that have been occurring in a middle-of-nowhere Louisiana town. The river near town has turned to blood. All the fish have died; I guess they didn’t like swimming in blood. Katherine and her assistant Ben (played by Idris Elba from The Wire) travel to the swampy, backwoods town. They test the bloody water. They meet the weird townsfolk. They experience all manner of biblical plagues re-enacted in terrible computer generated effects: frogs falling from the sky, lice, locusts, a scary little girl, boils, fire from heaven. Will Katherine rediscover her faith in the face of such obviously unexplainable events? Will the scary little girl be scary? Will Ben die? Are the townsfolk involved in a satanic cult?

This is a terrible movie. It’s the worst movie I have seen in the last ten years, maybe fifteen, maybe in my life. I’ve seen tons of bad movies and reviewed many of them here. I think the thing that makes this movie so incredibly bad (besides the reasons I’ll go into in below) is that it thinks it’s good. It should be good. It has a great actress (Swank) and a great supporting actor (Elba, not Morrissey). It has a big budget. It has the backing of a major studio (Warner Brothers). It is a colossal mess, a stinking trash-heap of a film.

The direction and editing are incompetent. The story jumps all over the place; one minute the actors are in one location and seconds later they are miles away. There is little to no continuity. In one scene, Hilary Swank is wearing waders while tromping through a river of blood. In the next scene she’s investigating some ruins; the waders have disappeared. Then she’s back in the river, again with the waders (I fly fish. I’ve worn waders. They don’t magically disappear when you get on dry land). The director attempts to wring jump scares out of every suspenseful moment. It's not scary. It's distracting.

The dialogue is hilariously bad. The characters explain everything they are doing and then they explain it again, saying things like, “so you are saying” or “what you mean is” for those of us who may have an extra chromosome or two. This is an R-rated movie; it’s written for an audience of five year-olds. Sloppy pseudoscience babble. Biblical myth mumbo-jumbo.

I don’t think there’s one scene in the movie where practical effects are used. Every effect is rendered in some of the worst CGI imaginable. Everything looks fake and green-screened. The locust scene is laughable. The climatic fire from heaven scene is a total joke. Nothing looks worse than CG fire effects. I get the feeling that the entire effects budget for this movie went to the locust scene. Locusts flying in waves and killing rednecks. A father/son moment.

The Reaping should be taught in film classes across the country as an example of how not to make a movie. It is a travesty of filmmaking, a catastrophe. Its anti-science message is appalling. In one scene, Hilary’s character asks the little girl, “How do I know what’s real?” to which the girl responds, “Faith.” Yep, lesson learned. I felt like I was watching a born-again Christian propaganda film—one of those Left Behind movies. Even though I consider myself a skeptic, I’m all for suspension of disbelief in films; I love The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby and Poltergeist even though I don’t believe in the irrational claims of those films. That’s not the point of this movie; it wants you to discard your empirical/rational ways of knowing in favor of a faith-based, biblical literalism. This film makes Darkness Falls and Cold Creek Manor seem like masterpieces of modern horror.

The Reaping is ass.