Flatliners | Through the Shattered Lens

Jeff and I are currently on a little road trip but we’re not going to let something like that prevent us from seeing the latest bad movies.

For instance, last night, we saw the remake of Flatliners at the AMC 8 in Ardmore, Oklahoma. Ardmore is a lovely little town. When I was six years old, my family briefly lived in Ardmore and I can still remember this deserted barn that was sitting right at the edge of our property. My older sisters all told me that it was haunted and I can still remember sneaking over to the window in the middle of the night and staring at that dilapidated barn, searching for ghosts. Even though I was only six at the time, it’s still an incredibly vivid memory and I still have dreams about that barn. That’s the power of a good scare and that is exactly what’s missing from Flatliners. This is seriously one of the most forgettable films that I’ve ever seen.

I did get a little excited when I discovered that the film co-starred Nina Dobrev. Most people know her as Elena from The Vampire Diaries but, for me, she’ll always be Mia Jones on Degrassi. (Mia was not only a high school student and a star on the spirit squad. She was also: a single mother, a model, a drug addict, and J.T.’s girlfriend during the show’s sixth season.) She’s one of many Canadians in the cast of Flatliners. There’s also Ellen Page and Kiefer Sutherland.

That’s right, Kiefer Sutherland returns in the new version of Flatliners. But don’t get too excited. He’s not playing the same character. If he had been playing the same character, this film would have been a lot more interesting and he could have told the new cast, “Your sins have returned in physical form … and they’re pissed off!” Instead, he’s just playing a clueless doctor with really weird hair. I think we’re just supposed to be impressed by the fact that he agreed to appear in the remake and I guess I would be if the first one was some sort of award-winning classic or something. It’s not like the original Flatliners is the defining role of Kiefer Sutherland’s career. Now, if they had gotten Oliver Platt to come back…

ANYWAY, it’s pretty much the same story all over again, just told with a lot less visual flair. (Say what you will about Joel Schumacher as a director, he understood that the first Flatliners needed a lot of neon.) This time, it’s Ellen Page who convinces her friends to let her die and then revive her after two minutes. The remake does add an interesting wrinkle in that, when Page returns from being dead, she is now suddenly super smart and has total recall. At the very least, this explains why all the rest of her friends are then so eager to try it out for themselves. Even though it feels like a Limitless knock off, it’s still an interesting idea and I think that if the entire film had been about the students obsessively killing themselves and coming back, all in an effort to achieve some sort of Godhood, it would have made for an intriguing movie.

But that whole angle kind of gets abandoned. Soon, it’s time for everyone’s sins to start showing up. That means that Ellen page has to deal with her dead sister. Nina Dobrev has to deal with a dead patient. Another doctor has to deal with a girl she bullied. The movie tries to make you wonder whether or not they’re just having hallucinations but why would a hallucination feel the need to sneak around a room while its target isn’t looking?

Plus, I have to wonder: there are real people out there who have been clinically dead, just to have been brought back to life. Some of them have reported seeing the bright light and all the rest. If you follow this movie’s logic, are they all now secretly smart and being chased around by their past sins? If that’s the case then I’m looking forward to the sequel to Heaven Is For Real.

It’s a forgettable movie. The first Flatliners had its own stupid charm but the remake just falls flat.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_4gKgj8i54

“Our sins have come back in a physical form … and they’re pissed!”

That one line pretty much sums up the original 1990 version of Flatliners. It’s a good line in that it’s one that you remember and it’s a line that you can use in almost any situation.

Have you gotten a phone call from an unknown caller? “Our sins have come back in physical form … and they’re pissed!”

Have you and your boyfriend recently been driving across Texas and suddenly noticed that a car has been following you all the way from Lake Dallas to the border of Oklahoma. “Our sins have come back in physical form … and they’re pissed!”

Have you ever had a stranger fail to hold a door open for you? There’s only one possible reason for that rudeness. “Our sins have come back in physical form .. and they’re pissed!”

And don’t even get me started on people who leave negative comments under my reviews. We all know what’s going on with that! “Our sins have come back in physical form … and they’re pissed!”

It’s a line that is both oddly memorable and also deeply stupid. The same description can be applied to Flatliners. It’s a film about a group of medical students (played by Julia Roberts, William Baldwin, Oliver Platt, and Kevin Bacon) who help Kiefer Sutherland investigate whether or not there’s actually an afterlife. Sutherland believes that there is but he needs an atheist to be a part of the group, that’s where Kevin Bacon comes in. And he needs a potential love interest and a Baldwin brother to be a member of the group as well, that’s why Julia Roberts and William Baldwin are there. And, of course, someone has to provide comedic relief whenever things start to get too dark. Say hello to Oliver Platt! Anyway, Sutherland’s plan is to die for a minute or two and then have his fellow medical students bring him back to life. It sounds like kind of a dumb idea but everyone agrees to it.

Anyway, it turns out that the afterlife looks a lot like an overproduced student film, full of weird camera angles, tinted lighting and disembodied voices. When Sutherland dies, he sees a boy that he used to bully. Julia Roberts sees her father, who committed suicide when she was younger. Kevin Bacon sees a little girl that he used to bully. (There are a lot of bullies in this movie.) William Baldwin, a sex addict who is chronically unfaithful to his fiancée, sees hundreds of women, all saying, “But you said you loved me.” Oliver Platt never actually gets to die and therefore, he sees nothing. He does make a joke about how his vision would probably involve an angry babysitter. I laughed.

What happens next? “Our sins have come back in physical form … and they’re pissed!”

Flatliners has an intriguing premise but oh my God, is it ever a silly film. It’s not really a spoiler to tell you that all of these returned sins want the characters to either atone for their mistakes or make peace with their past. For Kevin Bacon, this means tracking down the girl that he used to bully and allowing her to bully him. For Julia Roberts, it means getting an apology from her Dad and understanding that he was addicted to heroin. For William Baldwin, it means making peace with never being as well-known as either Alec or Steven. As for Kiefer … well, things are a bit more complicated for Kiefer Sutherland.

Flatliners starts out as a horror film but then it turns into a squishy movie about letting go of bitterness and learning how to forgive oneself. It’s kind of annoying that the film couldn’t just stick to being scary because the first half of the film does have some effectively tense moments. However, it all gets lost as the film’s plot sinks into sentimental, New Age-y quicksand.

Flatliners was directed by Joel Schumacher, who generally does well with shallow films that 1) don’t really mean anything and 2) don’t involve super heroes. And really, the only film that I can think of that’s more shallow than the original Flatliners is the remake. (But we’ll talk about that later…) Schumacher’s direction here is not particularly bad — everyone looks good and the film is never boring. It’s a very, very pretty film and one that doesn’t add up to much.

I would suggest watching it with your sins, especially after they take physical form. Maybe they’ll be a little less pissed off afterward.