Flatliners (2017)

FLATLINERS
(PG-13, Columbia Pictures, 109 mins., theatrical release date: Sept. 29, 2017)

Did you know that when you die, apparently your spirit leaves your body and swoops down the same CG cityscape as seen in the current HBO Feature Presentation bumper. That's all there is to learn from the 2017 revival of the previously-discussed Flatliners. I'm not fond of Joel Schumacher's 1990 brood feast in an everlasting way, but at least it once played on HBO with a minute-long introduction (in SPACE!) which earns its nostalgia. There are no specs rosy enough to make the new model seem appealing now let alone in 2044.

Schumacher had been a fickle, flippant filmmaker throughout the entire 1980s (following the "hip" ensemble dramedy St. Elmo's Fire with the "hip" ensemble horromedy The Lost Boys), whereas Niels Arden Oplev at least has the original 2009 adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo to his credit. But it hasn't been a good year for Tomas (Let the Right One In) Alfredson let alone Oplev, on top of everything else you can think of going wrong in 2017. Screenwriter Ben Ripley adapts Peter Filardi's original story, but he's not at Source Code efficiency this time. Despite his user friendly surname, Ripley is slumming it in a dimwitted regression to the DTV half of the Species saga he began with.

Full disclosure: I needed the fast-forward button on my DVD player to keep me from death by boredom. Flatliners runs a grueling two hours thanks to protracted, derivative scenes of creeping terror but still manages graceless transitions and a dearth of investment. Oprev and Ripley ignored the notion that flatlining creates the kind of rush which one character suggests should be bottled and sold as a "club drug." Theirs is instead a sleepy-time depressant you swig once the party's over.

Kiefer Sutherland re-emerges from Schumacher's gothic amber playing not the older version of ringleader Nelson Wright, but instead an inconsequential cameo as the movie's Dr. House, "Woolfson." It's Ellen Page as Courtney Holmes who assumes Nelson's obsession with the afterlife nine years after drowning her kid sister Tessa in a texting-while-driving wreckage. Courtney strong-arms second year womanizer Jamie (James Norton) and the fearfully studious Sophia (Kiersey Clemons) into assisting her two-minute demise. The Oliver Platt-like outsider is Diego Luna's morally assertive yet mischievous Ray, and our Julia Roberts manqué is the woeful Nina Dobrev as Marlo.

Working in the basement of their hospital in order to take advantage of a functioning MRI machine, they competitively stop their hearts by lowering their body temperature via a cooling jacket and receiving a fatal hit from the defibrillator. Courtney claims that her astral projection was actually "a little sexual," but good luck sensing this based on the screensaver visuals Oprev preserves. The carnality is strictly TV-PG, as Sophia has a vigorous if ridiculous tryst with Jamie and moony Ray confesses his love to Marlo. Save for Ray, the resurrected med students tap into repressed mental faculties whether it's book knowledge or bread recipes or, in the 25-year-old Sophia's case, standing up to her mother, who demands she Win At All Costs.

Sure enough, they also dredge up their guiltiest secrets in the form of vengeful apparitions. Courtney is haunted by the Samara-style ghost of her sibling. Player Jamie, instead of being shamed by all of his conquests a la Billy Baldwin, is pestered by one long-lost lover he deserted upon impregnating. And in a racial inverse of Kevin Bacon's sin, it's black Sophia who humiliated a smarter schoolmate by hacking and dissembling her naked photos. This entails the same quest for forgiveness as before, but only after one of them is flatlined permanently by his/her demon.

The urgency of their predicament is euthanized by the deadening ways in which they go about killing themselves and then celebrate their complicated resuscitations with slow-mo hedonism before their interminable torment by Paranormal Activity spooks. Flatliners has no soul to lose. Without visuals worthy of Jan de Bont's breathtaking cinematography from the original, the numbing cycle instead comes on like probable outtakes from Platinum Dunes' A Nightmare on Elm Street 2. Schumacher, for all his flaws, was at least wittily portentous and filmed the original's crises of conscience with variety and elegance. Oprev's Flatliners has no identity of its own away from the most crushingly familiar of "quiet...quiet...BANG!" exploitation.

Even more so than the original, there is a airbrushed vacancy to the characters' games of one-upsmanship and their ability to function as promising healers. Though Courtney and Jamie come out of the experience with amazing powers of diagnosing rare diseases and administering life-saving drugs, I didn't feel the overriding sense of real, irresponsible danger in these egotistic tests. There's no mortality to their madness, and whatever invigoration they get from playing chicken with death doesn't seem worth the possibility of brain damage or psychological instability or terminal malpractice.

Flatliners flits from one half-assed conceptual triviality to another, freed from gravity just like its cast during those out-of-body experiences. Not since posing as Kitty Pryde for disgraced hack Brett Ratner has Ellen Page been so egregiously squandered. Diego Luna (has it already been 16 years since Y Tu Mamá También?) and Kiersey Clemons (a comedic charmer as seen in Neighbors 2) have too proven themselves overqualified for this tedium, which is more than can be said for small screen ciphers Nina Dobrev and James Norton. The work Oplev and Ripley have done could've been accomplished by any slumming work-for-hires toiling under the Screen Gems banner. There's nothing exquisitely tricky or emotional to make their Flatliners come alive, just 110 minutes which transition into rigor mortis early on and never lets up. It's the kind of stiff which you don't so much as review as perform an autopsy on. And with so many people trying to look on the bright side of a downer year, the sooner we bag and tag Flatliners '17, the better.

Flatliners

FLATLINERS
(R, Columbia Pictures, 115 mins., theatrical release date: August 10, 1990)
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"It's a good day to die," broods the aspiring Norse God of Medicine, Nelson Wright (Kiefer Sutherland). A cocky gunner eager to know the true nature of the Afterlife, Nelson recruits four of his fellow undergrads for a radical, risky experiment in which he will temporarily shake off his mortal coil through hypodermics and heat blankets. The EKG screen will not detect a heartbeat for thirty seconds, leaving only the vertical line of death. If his accomplices can resuscitate him back into consciousness, Nelson will have conclusive knowledge about the out-of-body experience. If not, then consider him the freshest cadaver on campus.

Somewhere between life and death, between heaven and hell, between St. Elmo's Fire and Final Destination, that is where you'll find Flatliners. The early 1990s was a glorious period for morbid mainstream movies about the Great Beyond. In particular, Bruce Joel Rubin busted this theme wide open with his scripts for both Ghost and Jacob's Ladder, but it was first time writer Peter Filardi who devised the premise for this one. The director is Joel Schumacher, fresh off of St. Elmo's Fire and The Lost Boys, working with a new batch of rising stars but otherwise up to his tawdry old tricks. Although the setting is Chicago, this may as well be "the murder capital of the world" all over again, and the pompous main characters do like to spend their nights at the bar after a hard night of cheating death. Give ‘em a little drop more.

Nelson's lab partners include Rachel Mannus (Julia Roberts), the obligatory love interest with maternal bedside manner; resident atheist David Labraccio (Kevin Bacon), who gets a four-month suspension for performing noble if unauthorized gynecological surgery on a dying woman; sleazy womanizer Joe Hurley (William Baldwin), who is tasked with filming the experiments using the same camcorder he uses to covertly record his many conquests; and portly philosopher Randy Steckle (Oliver Platt), the requisite voice of deadpan, comical reason. They converge in what appears to be an abandoned, spherical chapel flown over from the Renaissance, less the University of Illinois or even the Art Institute of Chicago and more of a Dan Brown fever dream of higher education.

Once Nelson is successfully revived after thirty seconds in the Void, his skeptical colleagues prove overzealously eager to not just recreate the experience, but to bid on who can last the longest in limbo. Rachel and Joe are the first to argue, but it is he who wins the next slot on the slab, and once again the results prove successful. Unfortunately, Nelson and Joe start to have recurring, guilt-addled hallucinations related to the lives which flashed before them in death, and withhold their anxieties until after David and Rachel subsequently take their turns.

Flatliners takes the notion of how your life flashes before your eyes in the throes of death and places it in the actual being of non-existence. Furthermore, it finds a pop psychological spin on the theme of being tormented by your sins. The first two times look innocent enough for Nelson and Joe, as the former experiences a reverie of childhood straight out of a marketing firm brainstorming session and the latter is surrounded by buxom models in what could pass a Herb Ritts-directed interlude (you could easily imagine Chris Isaak or Madonna singing in your head). Eventually, both Filardi the scripter and Schumacher the stylist grow more and more inspired by the Nightmare on Elm Street series, as waking life segues into ghastly fantasy. Nelson is haunted by a figure in a red-hooded sweatshirt attacking him with a hockey stick, an image straight out of 1970s bad kid cinema. David is also confronted by his childhood cruelty in the form of an ostracized black girl, whilst Rachel encounters the ghost of her daddy, a junkie Vietnam vet who committed post-traumatic suicide.

The combination of the graven and garish manifests a kind of navel-gazing pretentiousness that makes Flatliners a chore to sit through. If Schumacher was aiming for camp, he's much less assured here than he was in The Lost Boys. Recall how Kiefer Sutherland relished the head vampire role in that film with a demonic zest that made his performance less like a deliberate pose, creepy and charismatic in equally-calibrated measure. In Flatliners, Sutherland is unable to balance the scales, sinking into a one-note solemnity which is good for conveying nervousness but not investment. His vulnerability seems like a put-on, a bratty defense mechanism rather than something natural to the character. Compared to the subtle touches of humanism found in his co-stars Bacon and Roberts, Sutherland's velvet-throated authority is wasted.

William Baldwin and Oliver Platt are equally misused, essaying the two characters who don't seem to pull their weight amongst the drama. It's all too easy to peg Baldwin's Joe Hurley as a fictitious cheap shot at St. Elmo's Fire star Rob Lowe, and whilst his sexist ego is dutifully detonated, there's no satisfactory pay-off to Hurley other than his debasement. Platt is pithy and witty as Steckle, but underplays to a deadly degree that he becomes nothing more than a mere lackey.

The best performances in the film belong to Kevin Bacon and Julia Roberts in a role that preceded her Pretty Woman fame in production if not exposure. Bacon tempers his madness with vulnerability and rational cool, whilst Roberts knows how to play a potential moment of empty schmaltz close to the bone and frequently comes up aces. Their romantic liaison doesn't exactly cause for a lot of sparks, and is as superficial as most of the screenplay's attitude, but these two stars give the movie whatever soul is buried under the artifice.

Alas, Schumacher's forte in lurid overkill makes drags the film down into inconsequence. A film concerned with Big Questions and Life-or-Death Stakes needs someone less concerned with making every frame as grossly literal as possible. Compare Flatliners to Adrian Lyne's work on Jacob's Ladder for an example of how you temper rock-video flashiness with honest-to-goodness tension and the thrill of the mystery. Schumacher surrounds himself with technical craftsmen who bring out the symbolism and style with reckless abandon, including cinematographer Jan De Bont and production designer Eugenio Zanetti among others, but these prove to be eyesores once you realize they are the norm. There are a few moments of simplistically surreal unease, particularly when Nelson walks alone through the town (watch out for those cyclists) and chases a dog down into a sewer, which hint at the kind of restraint Schumacher would've done better to harness. It's also Sutherland's finest moment in the entire film.

If Flatliners had demonstrated as much care and detail in the characters as it does in the settings, which doesn't so much parallel the students' brash decision to play God as much as it points the finger and laughs, this movie could've been on to something brilliant and affecting. Imagine this as a hired gun project for someone like David Cronenberg, and Flatliners becomes even more of a tragedy in hindsight.