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Reviews

Premonition

False reading

By PETER KEOUGH | March 21, 2007

1.0 Stars

VIDEO: Watch the trailer for Premonition.

Sometimes you wake up and life seems like a badly edited movie. Poor Linda (Sandra Bullock) can’t tell whether it’s Tuesday, when she and husband Jim (Julian McMahon) had a run-in about his new blonde assistant manager, or Wednesday, when Jim died in a car crash, or Sunday, when Dr. Roth (Peter Stormare) shot her full of thorazine and took her to the booby hatch. She even tries putting together a chart, something director Mennan Yapo doesn’t seem to have referred to. Thank God the local priest puts everything in perspective with a string of family-values clichés. David Lynch’s Inland Empire finds a woman undergoing a similar disruption in chronological narrative, but where Empire shatters common-sense preconceptions of self and reality, Premonition clutches at the comfort of trite platitudes. Neither film makes much sense; in Premonition, however, that’s the result of incompetent filmmaking rather than an insight into the way things are.

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