Big Picture Big Sound

Sow What?

It's always the same. A formerly devout skeptic investigates strange happenings that can only be explained through faith and a few well-chosen bible verses. "The Exorcist" may have done it best thanks to some witty Priest vs. Satan banter, and TV's "The X-files" made a pretty good run at this premise for seven seasons ("Millenium", not so much). The latest trip to the seemingly unending end-of-days trough is "The Reaping", a mildly incoherent stab at bringing the ten biblical plagues to the big screen. Hilary Swank stars, in another questionable Oscar follow-up ("The Black Dahlia", "The Core"), as Katherine Winter, a former minister who (wouldn't you know it) lost her faith after the tragic (and entirely preposterous) death of her husband and daughter. Working now as a professional miracle-debunker at Louisiana State University, Katherine is called to the small town of Haven to investigate a river which, you might say, is suffering from a form of "red tide" poisoning.

Once Katherine arrives in Haven, with her trusty sidekick and the film's only comic relief, Ben (Idris Elba), she immediately starts working on a scientific cause for the bloody river. No sooner does she begin taking samples than frogs start falling from the sky. Ever the disbeliever, Katherine sticks to her guns, listing a litany of possible explanations for the ten biblical plagues and promising a film that could still be pretty good. Then, sadly, "The Reaping" takes a turn. Katherine stops being a scientist and starts becoming a plot device, wandering into dark corridors and having flashbacks at inopportune times. In fact, the entire middle of the film reeks of padding. There are several dream sequences (one of which, I think, is a dream-within-a-dream) as Katherine is haunted by visions of a little girl ("Bridge to Terabithia's" AnnaSophia Robb, wasted here) who may be her own daughter or Satan's spawn. It's a tough call.

While there's some potential in the idea of a movie about the ten plagues, the screenplay by twins Carey and Chad Hayes ("House of Wax") never quite finds it. The plagues appear at random times and with varying intensity. While a mile of river turns to blood, the flies appear to cover one unfortunate barbeque. The lice might infect an entire school, but the rain of frogs is just a few of the little buggers turned belly-up in a river. The more and more the film reveals its game the less and less interesting it becomes until finally the audience stops trying to put the pieces together. They just don't fit.

Stephen Hopkins ("Lost in Space") directs the film in a herky-jerky handheld style which is typically used to bring the audience closer to the action, giving it a documentary quality. Not so here. This technique may have worked during Mr. Hopkins' years on TV's "24" but "The Reaping", with its overly dramatic acting and a soundtrack full of false scares, never grounds itself in any kind of reality. There is little driving the story and Katherine isn't so much a heroine as a passive witness, waiting for an explanation from the kindly Father Costigan (Stephen Rea, slumming it) which sounds like, as she puts it, "a convoluted contradictory nonsensical legend".

In a fit of marketing zeal, "The Reaping" comes to theaters just in time for the Passover/Easter season. This is a tacky but understandable ploy for which, if I remember my Bible correctly, the filmmakers will most likely be forgiven