Annoyingly Inept ‘After.Life’ Bores Audience to Death
Submitted by BrianTT on April 9, 2010 - 9:38am.
‘After.Life’ stars Christina Ricci, Liam Neeson, Justin Long, Josh Charles, Chandler Canterbury and Celia Weston. It was written by Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo & Paul Vosloo & Jakub Korolczuk and directed by Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo. It opened on April 9th in local theaters. It is rated R.
Continuing reading for Matt Fagerholm’s full “After.Life” review.
After.Life
Photo credit: Anchor Bay Entertainment
 Rating: 1.0/5.0 |
CHICAGO – “After.Life” is one of the first truly awful films of 2010. Its aggressive solemnity combined with its head-slapping silliness will cause most viewers to simply laugh it off the screen. There’s at least two possible ways to interpret its murky story, and they’re both ludicrous. The only mystery guaranteed to linger in moviegoers’ minds is the inexplicable motivation of Christina Ricci and Liam Neeson to take part in this direct-to-video dreck.
First-time feature director Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo tries far too hard to get a reaction out of her audience. There are countless instances where loud clangs are heard on the soundtrack, followed by characters asking Ricci (and presumably the viewer), “Are you scared?” Frankly, there were more scares in “Casper.” The filmmakers spend so much time making noise that they forget to build suspense. Paul Haslinger’s irritating score has perhaps the greatest overuse of suspended cymbal rolls in film history, punctuating nearly every scene with a blaring crescendo until it quickly becomes an unintentional running gag.
| Read Matt Fagerholm’s full review of “After.Life” in our reviews section. |
Ricci plays Anna, a morose teacher who listlessly wanders through her daily routine as if the life has been drained from her body (she’s literally dead on arrival). Her long-suffering boyfriend Paul (Justin Long) improbably puts up with her cool indifference. In the first of many forced conflicts, Anna storms out of a restaurant after an inane misunderstanding with Paul, and immediately gets in a car crash. She awakens in a funeral home, where the seemingly sinister funeral director, Eliot Deacon (Neeson), is beginning to prepare her body for burial. He explains to her that he has the gift of communicating with souls of the deceased as they transition to the after.life, but Anna insists that she isn’t dead. Is Eliot endowed with a sixth sense, or is he merely a self-righteous serial killer?
Continuing reading for Matt Fagerholm’s full “After.Life” review.After.Life
Photo credit: Anchor Bay Entertainment
E-mail this Story
Delicious
Digg
StumbleUpon
Propeller
Reddit
Magnoliacom
Newsvine
Furl
Facebook
MySpace
Twitter
Google
Yahoo
Buzz Up!
LinkedIn
Technorati
Icerocket
Hate amateur reviews like this
Saw this movie as well and really enjoyed it. Smart and unsettling. But clearly the reviewer won’t let that stand in the way of cheap jokes and scoring cheap points. It’s obvious the reviewer didn’t get the movie (his loss) but to rant on like this is just poor journalism. It’s a shame that amateurs like him get such a voice on the internet.
Ridiculous review...
Yes it’s far fetched but it’s a film!!!!! And it’s not a bad one either, I thoroughly enjoyed it and found this review to be absurd….
annoying
This film made absolutley no sense.No wonder it went straight to video.I agree with the reveiwer that this film was absurd and quite frankly aggravating.
Post new comment