Movie Review: Flatliners (2017)

In the long saga of Hollywood believing that if it worked once, we should repackage it and sell it again, this is a remake of a 1990 movie, one I did not see at the time.  Having not seen the original, I can only assess the current movie. The story made sense about halfway through, then got quite tame and sort of boring as it moved on. There may be SPOILERS ahead, but please, don’t waste too much money seeing this.

The movie opens with some sort of flashback of Ellen Page’s getting into a car accident. The next thing we see is her working at a hospital with other young doctors. For whatever plot jumping reason, she decides to get two of her friends to help her with a so-called experiment, letting her body die and come back to life. This already seems like a poorly thought out plan, but whatever, they do it, and suddenly she like unlocks all this stuff and can do all these things. The other kids go and it doesn’t really get better. Each of them begins to be haunted by misdeeds they did in the past. This is just as stupid as it sounds. I really stopped paying attention, but basically Ellen Page’s ghost of her dead sister pushes her off of a fire escape, but everyone else escapes just fine.

With respect to me diversity and strong female representation test (the Hina test), this one gets a very small pass. The main character was a gay woman. Even though this wasn’t explicit, the way Page’s character dressed left little misinterpretation. There were two other women, one white (Nina Dobrev of Vampire Diaries) and some African American girl that seemed familiar. There were no other minorities really present, but it had a good mix. It wasn’t like last week’s Friend Request where the entire cast was white.

Overall, this was not a very good movie and I’m glad I paid under $7 to see it. Plus I stole ice from the theatre to ice my knees, so that was fun.