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Movie Review: 'Flatliners'

Why does this remake exist?

By Sean PatrickPublished 6 years ago 3 min read
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Flatliners is a remarkably bad movie. I love Eliot Page, she is a very compelling and charismatic actor. Why has she been marginalized so much that she felt she needed to make this bizarrely dumb movie? What compelled her and the very talented director Niels Arden Oplev, director of the Swedish Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, think this movie was a good idea? Why did anyone think that remaking a movie as bad as the original Flatliners was a good idea? The Joel Schumaker directed 1990 Flatliners is a terrible movie and somehow this version manages to be worse than that. I’m baffled.

Flatliners stars Eliot Page as Courtney, a medical student who is plagued by the memory of the death of her younger sister in an accident that was her fault. Nine years after the accident Courtney has become consumed by the idea of knowing whether or not there is an afterlife where she might atone for her sin. Wanting to know about the afterlife she conceives of an experiment where she will have fellow med students stop her heart and let her die for a few minutes before bringing her back with the secrets of death.

Joining Courtney for the experiment is Sophia (Kiersey Clemons) and Jamie (James Norton) a trust fund kid who Courtney assumes is just reckless enough to go along with the plan. Dragged into the experiment are Ray (Diego Luna) and Marlo (Nina Dobrev) who jump in when Sophia and Jamie struggle to bring Courtney back to life. If you bought into the idea that Courtney might not come back after her first Flatline you might just be the audience for this movie. The complete lack of suspense in this scene doesn’t prevent lots of heavy breathing and forced tension.

Of course, Courtney must come back to life because her subsequent hallucinations are the source of most of the film’s jump scares. Courtney decides to keep the jump-scare-itis she contracted from flatlining to herself and when Jamie sees her thriving, answering difficult questions, relearning how to play the piano, as if her brain has been rewired by flatlining, he decides he must do it next. The film again must give us the forced fake tension of whether he’s going to come back or not. He does and then it’s party montage time because the last thing this movie needs is to do anything we can’t predict.

Eventually Sophia and Marlo Flatline and contract Jump-Scare-itis leading to scenes where their hallucinations come to life and do physical harm to them. In a coincidence of all coincidences, each of our Flatlining crew is or was a terrible person whose hallucinations are based on horrible things they’ve done in their past including one of them having killed a man and lied about it. What are the odds that the only people participating in the Flatline experment are all horrible human beings? What would happen if a good person flatlined? The movie has no answer for that but I assume good people can’t flatline because they are immune to jump-scare-itis.

The remarkable number of bad ideas in Flatliners extends to the supporting cast and specifically to the casting of Kiefer Sutherland, one of the all-star cast members from the 1990 Flatliners. Here was the one chance to do something interesting with Flatliners, bring back Sutherland’s Nelson and engage the idea of what he remembers 27 years after Flatlining. He could be the perfect hero or villain in this story. He could be haunted or he could be the one to save them. But, NOPE!

In the 2017 Flatliners, Kiefer Sutherland is stunt cast as Dr. Wolfson, the gang’s hard-ass professor who has zero to do with the plot. Sutherland is completely unnecessary to the plot. Why is he here? Why bother recalling the original so directly? Don’t get me wrong, the original is nearly as bad as this remake so turning this into a sequel wasn’t going to help matters all that much but it would have offered some dramatic options.

At the very least, Sutherland is a better and more charismatic actor than anyone in this movie not named Eliot Page. Sutherland’s silly intensity and prickishness was the most entertaining thing about the original Flatliners. What might have been the lingering effect of flatlining 27 years later is a far more interesting question than anything raised in this remake. As it is, the use of Sutherland only serves to underline how unnecessary and downright silly the idea of a remake of an already bad movie was to begin with.

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About the Creator

Sean Patrick

Hello, my name is Sean Patrick He/Him, and I am a film critic and podcast host for the I Hate Critics Movie Review Podcast I am a voting member of the Critics Choice Association, the group behind the annual Critics Choice Awards.

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