PREMIERE.COM'S MOVIE REVIEW (posted 3/15/07)

In Kurt Vonnegut's classic novel, Slaughterhouse Five, his hero Billy Pilgrim becomes "unstuck in time," haphazardly waking up in different periods of his life. In Premonition, Sandra Bullock's second recent time-shift romantic drama (see last June's The Lake House), her character, Linda Hanson, becomes "unstuck in time" in the Vonnegut sense, but only within one week of her life. She wakes up to find her husband has been killed in a car crash only to fall asleep and wake up several days before the event. She then falls back to sleep and wakes up several days after, then before, then after, and so on. You get the wearying picture.

We eventually learn that Linda's marriage was on the rocks. But she is finding this out just as we are. In fact it seems as if the character was plopped down into the middle of this life just moments before the film started. We know little other than what has happened to her this week. She has no back story, nor in fact, do any of the other characters. Her lump of a husband, played by Julian McMahon, is either ignoring her or being snide in nearly every scene, so the impending tragedy of his death seems deserved rather than dreadful. Each time she awakens to find her husband alive again (still alive?) she is ecstatic — but he seems annoyed to see her, which is all the more off-putting.

Whereas films like Pulp Fiction, Amores Perros, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Syriana weave their narratives out of sequence, allowing the viewer to connect the dots and ultimately elevate an already engaging narrative, Premonition resorts to having Bullock draw a timeline on a piece of paper with a magic marker to make sense of the time shifts. Had the story unfolded in sequence it would be equally preposterous but even less interesting — nothing more than the story of a woman who had a really bad week.

To make matters worse, this is the weakest version of a film already made poorly, twice in the past few years. Like The Forgotten and Flightplan, Premonition is the story of a mother who loses her children and is labeled a lunatic for remembering things no one else can. Of the three, only Flightplan even tried to explain the phenomena in a way that made sense. Even The Forgotten, which abandoned all attempts to give the film an ending, choosing instead an "aliens did it" cop out, delivered an intriguing premise and a truly creepy setup. Premonition relies on the time shift gimmick but the high-concept premise has nothing to back it up.

In place of logic or consistency, the filmmakers bang you over the head with a sound mix so overblown you could mistake Premonition for a slasher film. Every time a phone rings, the music swells. Actually, anytime anything happens, the music swells. Bullock takes off a pair of dirty rubber gloves and it sounds like she is sloshing through a sewer. Though it sounds like a horror film, it isn't particularly suspenseful. The pumped up sound effects play like an overplayed laugh track on a sitcom that just isn't funny and only draws more attention how ineffective the filmmaking is.

—Scott Warren