In this modern day western, Billy Zane plays a U.S. Marshal who recruits a down on his luck sheriff (Zach Roerig) to help him capture a banker robber (Scott Adkins). Zane goes out to Adkins’s ranch and holds Adkins’s wife (Cara Jade Myers) hostage. Roerig is not okay with this, especially since he thinks that Zane and his men have ulterior motives for wanting to track Adkins. Eventually, some other yahoos show up, all wanting to join Zane’s posse, setting up a final violent showdown and Roerig having to decide which side he’s on.
Day of Reckoning had the right, dusty look and the acting was decent but it took forever for the action to actually start. Instead, there were way too many scenes of Roerig bonding with Myers, who spent nearly the entire running time handcuffed in a bathtub. Scott Adkins is a martial artist who has a huge online following but he didn’t get to show off any of his skills in the movie so I’m not sure what the point of casting him was. Trace Adkins (no relation to Scott) and Mike Wolfe (from AmericanPickers) are also in the movie and I’m always happy to see them. Rapper Yelawolf, who was supposed to be the next big thing 15 years ago, is also in DayofReckoning. He plays the imaginatively named Wolf. I liked Billy Zane’s performance but it was mostly just because he was Billy Zane. (I even liked him in Titanic because it’s impossible not to like Billy Zane.) There’s nothing that interesting or surprising about his character. It’s obvious that he’s going to turn out to be bad from the first moment he shows up.
Once the action does start up, it’s decent. I just wish there had been more of it and less scenes of everyone standing around giving each other the evil eye.
As our longtime readers know, I’ve seen my share of stupid movies but it’s hard for me to think of any recent film that’s quite as dumb as Rings.
It’s a shame, really. Rings, which came out in February of this year, is the second sequel to The Ring. Despite the fact that it’s been imitated by a countless number of inferior rip-offs and the film’s central premise of evil traveling through a VHS tape has become dated, The Ring actually holds up pretty well. But, Rings just does not work.
It should be said that Rings gets off to a good and chilling start, with passengers on an airplane asking if they’ve heard about “the tape that can kill you” and then Samara Morgan (Bonnie Morgan) suddenly appearing on every screen in the plane. It’s the film’s way of declaring, “Just because VHS tapes are a thing of the past, that’s not going to stop our Samara!” It’s a good opening but it’s also only five minutes and it’s followed by a “two years later…” title card.
Spoiler alert: two years later, everything goes down hill and the movie gets stupid.
The main plot of Rings deals with Holt (Alex Roe) and Julia (Matilda Lutz, who looks and sounds like Ellen Page but isn’t Ellen Page). They’re teenagers in love and when Holt leaves for college, they promise to skype each other every night. However, one night, Julia sits down in front of her laptop and discovers that Holt is not in his dorm room. Instead, there’s a woman demanding to know where Holt is.
HOLT HAS DISAPPEARED!
Julia goes to the college to find her boyfriend. She discovers that Holt has fallen in with a professor (Johnny Galecki) who apparently watched the infamous video tape. In order to avoid dying, the professor showed the tape to one of his students. And then he had that student find someone else to watch the tape and so on and so forth. I kept waiting for someone to ask the professor why he was ripping off It Follows but, apparently, no one at the college has ever seen a horror film.
Anyway, Holt has yet to force anyone to watch the video tape and he’s running out of time. In order to save her boyfriend’s life, Julia watched the video. Oddly, we don’t really get to see much of the video in Rings. I’m going to assume that the filmmakers felt that it would be pointless to show the whole video again since, presumably, the everyone in the audience has seen either The Ring or The Ring 2 or maybe even Ringu. But seriously, this is a Ring movie. Not showing the entire video without interruption feels almost disrespectful to the audience. It’s kind of like making a Friday the 13th movie and then refusing to actually show us Jason killing any of the counselors.
Anyway, after she watches the video, a weird symbol appears on Julia’s hand and somehow, all of this leads to Holt and Julia going to the town of Sacrament Valley, which is where Samara was buried after she was retrieved from that well at the end of the first Ring. Julia and Holt do some investigating, which basically means talking to a bunch of overacting character actors with inconsistent Southern accents. The film spends the majority of its time filling in Samara’s backstory, which is kind of pointless since we learned everything that we needed to know about Samara during the first two films. It’s enough to know that she’s a little girl who can pop out of your TV and kill you. She doesn’t really need the Ancestry DNA treatment that she gets from Rings.
Vincent D’Onofrio appears as a reclusive blind man, who might be the key to figuring out whatever’s supposed to be going on. D’Onofrio gives a performance that makes his work on Law and Order: Criminal Intent look subtle and nuanced. Normally, I wouldn’t mind an actor going over the top in a film like this but there’s nothing surprising about D’Onofrio’s character. Even when his big secret was revealed, I shrugged.
Rings is one of those worst movies of 2017, featuring bad acting, bad direction, and totally wasting whatever potential the franchise had left. The dialogue was so bad and the characters were so inconsistent that the movie actually made me angry. It doesn’t even work as a self-reflective parody.
For the sins of Rings, we all deserve to watch this:
Through the Shattered Lens 