The Reaping … Es not so bueno. It’s an odd and wobbly little duck, strange mostly for the reason it fails. Going in I thought the religious subtext was going to kill it, but as it turns out I was off. Nope, all the plague stuff is handled fine and dandy; it’s the second half plot and the culmination that doom this project straight to hell.
Hillary Swank plays a LSU professor/ field researcher. She’s employed in the field of miracle debunking. She seeks out religious phenomenon and exposes it to the harsh light of scientific reality. We get about twelve minutes of her acting uber-logical in what is clearly the set-up for when she’s going to have to deal with the fact that she was wrong all along! Or was she? Okay, now I’m just asking stupid questions for dramatic effect. I’ll move on.
If you’ve seen a trailer then you know The Reaping deals with the ten plagues of Egypt. Bloody rivers, locusts, frogs, you get the drill. All of this is handled with an unexpected subtlety. It actually works, and the film has a lot of potential going into the halfway mark. The most interesting part of the movie was when Swanky broke down how the biblical plagues might have actually happened. She’s clearly grappling with science versus religion, and that’s an interesting process to watch. After that high point everything starts devolving until the final giggle inducing scene.
What goes wrong is fairly easy to explain: it gets easy to predict and it relies on the age old method of scare: Music, silence, boo! You know the routine. A woman searching for something in a dark room on a rainy night. The scary music swells. Then it fades and all is silent. She thinks she’s safe. WHAM! A broom falls on her, but she shouldn’t have been afraid. Ha! Only it turns out the broom is evil. You get the idea, when you see that the methods being used aren’t innovative in the slightest it gets easy to tune out. The Reaping hits that note for about 30 minutes straight and it deflates the project from serious to obvious.
However, even with all its flaws this one is not without value. Swank brings a lot of dignity to a role that could have truly sucked in lesser hands. The effects are so understated that they’re actually kind of cool. This isn’t a deal where people are like “AAAAA, FROGS!” It’s more like “Let’s figure out what’s up with these frogs.” I liked that initial approach and that’s what saves this movie from a more savage rebuke.
Now, should you see this? Well, it’s mercifully short at 90 minutes if that helps. It’s not all bad either, it has a few genuine scares, and maybe you’ll find the ending more intriguing than I did. The tragic part is that religion doesn’t matter here. If you’re pious they handle the plague issue fairly and accurately. If you’re not then it all comes off as merely interesting. The Reaping places all its chips on the “plot” line and it doesn’t pay off. I call this a skip. Rent The Ten Commandments instead.
