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Stewart certainly puts his background in the foreground, conjuring up a number of skin-crawling images and cobbling them together with unfortunate casting, wooden monologues and a skimpy amount of internal logic. Paul Bettany comes down from the billowing curtains of Heaven (?!) to protect Adrianne Palicki’s unborn, unwanted child from an army of angels that tend to be bullet-proof and have a habit of possessing countless strangers in the most demonic form possible. We’ve got neck-nibbling moppets, ceiling-crawling grannies, mutating ice cream men, a swarm of locusts and a generic legion (natch) of quasi-zombies laying siege to Dennis Quaid’s middle-of-nowhere diner and picking off survivors who tend to put themselves right into harm’s way.

As some sort of strict cross between The Terminator and The Reaping, this could’ve been a perfectly cheesy action outing, but Stewart has an unfortunate tendency to dole out at least one monologue to each member of the cast, caring far more for his thinly-drawn characters than he has any right to expect an audience to and burdened with actors who couldn’t pull off pathos to save their life (I struggle to imagine a scenario in which I’d be rooting for Lucas Black to be anyone’s savior).

Every last “wouldn’t it be awesome if…” notion is exhausted to the point of absurdity. Angels with machine guns? Cool. Angels with maces? Fine. Maces that spin at the touch of a button? Less so. Victims covered in boils? Sure. Boils that spew acidic pus? Not so much. Maybe with an added sense of humor and a better sense of pacing, this could’ve been an agreeable B-movie, but the whole thing plays instead like some half-talky, half-batshit adaptation of a particularly half-assed Stephen King novel.

Bettany, however, can wield big guns against bigger forces with a straight face better than anyone else in this, both stoic in light of these circumstances and sympathetic to those individuals that he’s charged himself with protecting. He’s already starring in Stewart’s next project as a vampire-hunting priest; so long as he (and we) don’t have to listen to Tyrese reminiscence about “when [he] was a shorty,” it’ll be one step closer to salvation.

link directly to this review at https://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=19916&reviewer=409
originally posted: 01/23/10 09:01:54
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