Don’t let anyone fool you into thinking Premonition is a good film, or even a decent film. What it is, is a decent idea, but it is one of those ideas that you can just tell by the marketing that it just isn’t going to work. Premonition wants to be a smart psychological thriller and instead it is a jumbled mess that gets in its own way.
As I am sure you can tell from the trailer Linda Hanson (Sandra Bullock) goes through the tragic experience of learning her husband has died in a fatal car crash. The twist is that the next morning she wakes up and he is alive! What? No freaking way! That is impossible. Yes, it is actually not possible to do this, but it is the movies so let’s go with it.
After this fateful Thursday (remember that) Linda begins living random days here and there, she’ll wake up and it’s Tuesday and then the next day it might be Saturday. The only thing we as the audience know is that Jim (Julian McMahon) died on Wednesday (remember that too). The largest issue is the scattering of the days. Of course they needed to do this due to certain plot points, but I am not too keen on those either.
Aside from the ending, the most troubling incident centers on one of her daughters that suffers a tragic accident in which one day no one in the family knows how it happened and then, later in the movie, a different day of course, everyone knows how it happened and would have known how it happened. This would insinuate that everyone is suffering from the same problem as Linda, but Linda is the only one that realizes it is happening. Fat chance on that one.
Even if you are able to push aside the mid-story flaws the ending is extremely troubling if you think about it for even a second. Unfortunately this is a review and I don’t want to ruin it if you decide to waste your money on this feature.
Unfortunately for Sandra Bullock, who was doing well in the indie scene with Crash, Loverboy and Infamous, her bigger films such as The Lake House (which I actually partially enjoyed), Miss Congeniality 2 and now Premonition are certainly not doing all that well. As a matter of fact the last movie Sandra was in that I actually enjoyed was A Time to Kill and that was 1996 and it wasn’t even her film. I would have to go back to 1994 and Speed for a movie she was a major player in, and before that who knew Sandra Bullock? If this keeps up we may be asking who is Sandra Bullock?
