Directed by: Stephen Hopkins
Premise: Katherine, a former Christian missionary
turned miracle debunker (Hillary Swank), is at a loss to explain why a river in
a rural Louisiana town has turned to blood. Strange occurrences continue,
resembling the plagues of the Biblical story of Exodus, forcing Katherine to
reevaluate her faith.
What Works: Swank’s character is given an
effective back story that provides the character with a little more motivation
and weight than if she were just a secular humanist.
What Doesn’t: The most consistent feature of The
Reaping is its ability to take elements that start out fairly strong and
ruin them through stupid storytelling decisions. The flashbacks to Katherine’s
loss of faith after the death of her family in Africa begin with strong visuals
and emotional weight but this is destroyed when the flashbacks are used for
cheep scares. The film’s opening is quite strong because of its ambiguity, and
the film could have been an intelligent inquiry into the line between faith and
rationality in the vein of Carl Sagan or Red Serling, but instead The
Reaping lets too much go too early, killing the mystery and the tension. In
the conclusion, the film goes for a reversal of expectation, but this move makes
the film worse, because it opens up all sorts of plot holes and comes across as
a cheep gimmick that allows Swank’s character to get out of her ethical and
philosophical dilemma without any cost.
Bottom Line: The
Reaping attempts to be a strange combination of The Ten
Commandments, The
Wicker Man, The
Omen, and Rosemary’s
Baby but the result is more like End
of Days. While this film is not as annoying as The
Exorcism of Emily Rose or The
DaVinci Code, it is still fairly stupid and won’t do much for anyone
except those who think the Left Behind series is great literature.