Personally, I loved OG Flatliners. It’s not a good film, mind you, but it was an interesting concept and it was an interesting relic of that kind of bizarro “how did that get greenlighted” filmmaking from the 1990s. The film does not hold up at all, and if there’s any kind of reference to it at this point, it’s possibly in reference to Julia Roberts’ romantic history – Flatliners was the movie where Julia and Kiefer Sutherland were going to get married and runaway-bride’d the sh-t out of him and ran off with Jason Patric (Kiefer’s good friend). Go back and read People Magazine’s original reporting on that and just feel the scandal. It’s amazing. Movie stars really were different back in the ‘90s.
Anyway, no one asked for a remake of Flatliners. No one cared. It wasn’t a case of the first one being perfect and untouchable, it’s just… why would anyone remake a film which wasn’t good in the first place? But they remade it. And apparently it SUCKS.
Flatliners is in dire need of resuscitation. As of Sunday evening, the film is sporting a three percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 38 reviews. For much of the weekend, it was at zero percent before the review aggregator added this 3/5 review from the Daily Telegraph. Flatliners, a remake of Joel Schumacher’s 1990 film of the same name, is directed by Niels Arden Oplev and stars Ellen Page, Diego Luna, Nina Dobrev, James Norton and Kiersey Clemons as medical students who stop their hearts in order to get a glimpse of the afterlife. Schumacher’s Flatliners, which starred Julia Roberts and Kiefer Sutherland, was hardly a hit with critics, but holds a much higher score on Rotten Tomatoes: 49 percent. It also went on to be a financial success. The remake, which has a budget of $19 million, is expected to make somewhere between $5 million and $8 million this weekend.
Here’s a look at what the critics made of the movie.
The Hollywood Reporter’s John DeFore wasn’t all negative on the film, but begins his review this way: “How many Do Not Resuscitate jokes will be made about Flatliners, Hollywood’s latest attempt to bring a long-forgotten hit back from the dead for an audience raised on reheated cultural leftovers? A few, no doubt.”
IndieWire’s David Ehrlich notes that the film doesn’t explore the fact that the world is different than when Schumacher made his film: “If only its irony were the most painful thing about Flatliners, an artless and agonizingly boring remake of a semi-forgotten movie about the dangers of bringing things back from the dead,” he writes. “Lazily recycling the ’90s schlocky Joel Schumacher thriller of the same name (once a staple of video store shelves everywhere), this lifeless new version hits all the same beats as the original, but does so without a speck of the baroque style that made it such a fun thing to rent on a Friday night.”
The New York Times’ Glenn Kenny writes that Flatliners didn’t have the uphill battle that some remakes face, in that the original wasn’t all that beloved at the time to begin with (“The potential for accusations of sacrilege is minimal”). And Kenny highlights one area the film that is actually an improvement: “Mr. Schumacher’s movie is more a failed tone poem than a horror picture, and to its credit, this new version, with a trickier script by Ben Ripley and hyper-competent direction from the Swedish filmmaker Niels Arden Oplev improves on it — by making it behave like a horror movie every now and then.”
THR goes on to summarize and quote from like ten more awful reviews. I’m loving it. There’s something amazing about how bad movies bring out the best writing in film critics. One of the critics captured my feelings: while OG Flatliners was never a good movie, it was fun to watch because of the charisma of the actors. I mean, this was Julia Roberts at her most famous and infamous. This was Kiefer when he was rangy and hot. This was Kevin Bacon during his sexy 20s. While I know Hecate loves Diego Luna, it’s not the same thing!!
Anyway, Flatliners opened wide last Friday and it made $6.7 million. Which was actually on target for BO predictions, but still… I mean, that’s a really low figure. Or is it a high figure considering that every critic in America and Europe was like “this film is trash”?
Photos courtesy of Sony/’Flatliners’.
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