'Flatliners (2017)' REVIEW: A very so-so remake of a so-so psychological horror film

'Flatliners' is directed by Niels Arden Oplev and it is one of Hollywood's latest attempts to reboot a horror film, this time it's a remake or supposed sequel of 'Flatliners' which was released in the year 1990 that starred Kiefer Sutherland, Oliver Platt, Julia Roberts and Kevin Bacon. First of all, I had no idea that this was a reboot of something. I have only heard about because I'm sure like everyone else on the internet has seen the trailers that come up before they could watch their next YouTube video. It was everywhere for a while until a couple of weeks before release. But, being bombarded with the trailers and knowing that it has a good cast involved made me curious enough to want to watch the old one first just before seeing this new one. After having seen the old one, my thoughts are 'fine'. It had a great premise and cast, but the execution wasn't the best. It was slow paced, I couldn't connect with all the characters and had a lot of potential to be innovative psychologically. From looking at this director's filmography which consisted of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2009), I thought that this newest attempt on the premise of the film could be far better than it could've been with the original. Boy, I was wrong.

The premise of this film is that five young medical students Courteney (played by Ellen Page), Ray (played by Diego Luna), Sophia (played by Kiersey Clemons), Marlo (played by Nina Dobrev) and Jamie (played by James Norton) who make an experiment on what happens after you die momentarily. What's the afterlife like? What do they see? How do they feel? When some of them make that attempt, they start to see strange and disturbing things that could be the result of their sins from the past. So essentially, it's same story as the original.

Like I said before, this movie does have a pretty good cast that surprisingly have good chemistry. The performance are good, so you end up believing that these characters are friends with one another. The thing that I could find that I'd say is better than the original are the personalities of the central main characters and their individual backstories that led to their hallucinations are a little bit more compelling than those from the original. This movie is also fairly shot, lit well. Like the original there would be scenes of attempting to revive main characters and I'd often have my palms sweaty, so that's a plus. This movie overall was engaging enough to keep me entertained for most of its running time.

However, I thought that this was a completely forgettable movie and serves no reason to exist other than earning more money on the name (which I'm sure no one knew that this was a remake) and a fairly star studded cast. It's a horror film that's not scary. It's a psychological thriller that's not all that psychological. All the scary stuff is just a series of weak jump scares and a couple of exceptions. The movie even has the most sudden shift in main character I've seen in a while from a character that we were mostly attached to from the start and ends with the least compelling character in the movie (If you've seen it, you know who it is). What I was also extremely disappointed the most with this movie is that they announced that this movie would somehow act as a sequel to the original and that's a COMPLETE LIE. Kiefer Sutherland does make an appearance in the film and he doesn't play in any part of the plot at all. I don't even think that he even plays his original character. He's just an angry doctor of some sort. Another major problem with this movie is that it should've been rated R. It overall feels very tame and nothing grisly comes to mind when it comes to the hallucination sequences. The things that does make this film much weaker than the original is how it approaches its plot. In the original it was for the sake of science and discovering the truth of what happens in the afterlife. Here, it boils down to making the characters a little bit dumb or have selfish motivations which does make some of them a little but unlikeable. The only sensible character I was agreeing with the whole time was Diego Luna's character and he makes the smartest choices throughout the film. Finally, there's just not much interesting with the way it's directed. It doesn't seen like it has a singular vision. I imagined a film like this could've been better suited to be directed by someone like Sam Raimi.

If you were interested in watching this film because of the actors they have here, I still wouldn't recommend it. It has a couple of decent jump scares, but not enough to sustain a running time of 110 minutes so it fails at being a half decent horror film. It also has needless CGI effects that did make the audience laugh and left me baffled. It's mildly entertaining, but leaves no impact at all.

'Flatliners (2017)' gets a C