Horsemen [Reviewed by the Drudgeon]

90 min., 2009
Directed by Jonas Åkerlund
Language: English
My rating:
IMDB • Netflix • Official Site

This is an afterschool special made by angst ridden teens for their parents.  Yawn.

* * *

The movie begins with an old man walking in the snow and as he is about to chop down a tree his dog starts barking.  He approaches the dog and sees that on a frozen pond is a stand that is covered in a silver lid.  Upon opening it we switch to detective Aidan Breslin (Dennis Quaid) who is getting ready for work and it seems that his family life isn’t so good.  You see his wife died a while ago and he hasn’t been able to pull himself away from work long enough to spend some quality time with his two sons, younger Sean (Liam James) and Alex (Lou Taylor Pucci).  After a little bit of background (and some knowledge about teeth), Aidan is called in again, this time the body has been hung by a bunch of hooks and she was drowned with her own blood, and on the walls was written “Come and see”.  Her daughter, Kristen (Zhang Ziyi), seems to want a connection with someone and she finds Aidan to be comforting.  After some more time Aidan starts to put things together and he realizes that there are four of them and they are modeling themselves after the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.  As he gets deeper into the case, he starts getting even more distant from his kids.  Is work really more important than your family?

I don’t think I’ve ever seen Dennis Quaid act so poorly, wait on second thought I really don’t remember any other movie that I’ve seen him in and I’m just too lazy to look it up, so on that note, man Dennis Quaid can’t fucking act at all, wait again, he is good at acting disheveled but that’s about it.  Other than that he can’t show any emotions and the reciting of dialogue is just really poorly done.  Then we have everyone else who just can’t act either.  No one can convincingly deliver dialogue and they always come off as just over-the-top and hammy.

The only real good spot of the movie are the effects.  Most of them are really well done and they do put a decent amount of thought into the small parts of them.  The real exception to that is the scene where one character injects himself with PCP and when the needle enters the skin it looks painfully like a sponge, but that’s about the worst of it.

The biggest problem with the movie is the overall story and script.  At the beginning of the movie I really got the feeling that whoever wrote this watched Se7en quite often and decided to make their own movie.  But I have a feeling the person who wrote it was only 16 and their daddy worked way too much.  I can just hear him now “take that dad, I wrote a movie and showed you that teens have feelings and that killing themselves is the best way to show that we know better than you, HA”.  I was 16 once and I had my own angst and I knew what was better, but this whole movie is just extremely juvenile.  Not worth a look in any way and if you can’t figure out the ending by the halfway point, you should probably just kick yourself in the crotch.

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