Perhaps it is fitting that I happened to see Premonition the same day I saw I Think I Love My Wife. Just like the Chris Rock comedy, this film suffers from an identity crisis. The difference here is that Premonition's problems go a lot deeper than just not being sure what kind of a movie it wants to be. This is a lethargic, dull, and dim-witted film that doesn't know if it wants to be a sentimental tearjerker or some kind of bizarre supernatural time paradox movie. It tries to be both, and fails on both counts. The movie tries to keep our interest with some intriguing ideas and questions, but by the time they're revealed, we've already been bored to tears by the film's meandering screenplay that never truly winds up going anywhere.

Linda Hanson (Sandra Bullock) is a perfectly happy housewife who seems to have an idyllic marriage with her husband Jim (Julian McMahon) and young daughters (Shyann McClure and Courtney Taylor Burness). While Jim is away on a business trip, Linda receives the news from a grim-faced officer that her husband was killed recently in a car accident on the highway. Linda falls into a state of depression while her world falls apart around her, but when she awakens the next day, her husband is alive and in bed with her, as if nothing has happened. This continues as the days go on, as each time Linda falls asleep, she seems to find herself in a completely different day and time. Sometimes Jim is alive and everything is fine, and sometimes Jim is dead, and her family is trying to heavily medicate her in order to help her with her depression. Linda begins to feel that she is somehow being warned of things to come in the future, and more ominous signs start to appear, such as when terrible scars appear on her daughter's face for reasons unknown. She doesn't understand why or how these horrible premonitions of things to come are happening to her, but she knows she must use them to her advantage in order to prevent the horrific fate that's supposedly in store for both her and her family.

It is most likely for the best that Premonition doesn't even try to explain this impossible phenomenon as Linda finds herself suddenly jumping back and forth through the past and the future, as it would only further muddle the story, and the plot is already mucked up enough as it is. Besides things seemingly happening for no reason, the movie is content to constantly jerk it's audience around. The movie forces us to pay attention in every scene, dropping little clues and hints that seemingly will be important later, but none of them wind up amounting to much. Amongst them are a dead bird in the backyard, a woman at work whom Linda's husband may or may not be cheating with, and a doctor who prescribes some pills for Linda to seemingly help with her anxiety, but exists solely to make us question if Linda is going crazy or not. All of these elements of the plot are introduced, and then dropped, only to be brought up again, and be dropped again. Either that, or their ultimate role in the overall story winds up being a whole lot of nothing. The movie constantly infuriates us as it toys with us, promising us that our hard work in trying to figure it all out won't be in vain, only to laugh in our faces when the underwhelming answers are finally revealed. Most of the scenes play out like something out of a bad soap opera, and we eventually find ourselves just not caring and waiting for the answers come instead of trying to figure out what's going on.

The problem with the screenplay is that it seems to exist simply to throw as many plot twists and surprises as possible, and nothing else. It doesn't care about the characters, their relationships, or anything that happens to them. The characters are simply there to move the plot along, and jerk us around so many times that we feel whiplashed by the time it's all over. Linda is not so much a character, as she is a plot device. She barely has time to grieve for her husband before she's suddenly hurtling back and forth through time for reasons unexplained. We don't feel any personal connection to her or to her plight to find out the truth. She's simply making a mad dash from one end of the plot to the other, and we're just along for the ride. This is a fatal flaw for a film such as this, for in order for a story like this to work, we have to feel and identify with the heroine. The movie never gives us the chance to experience this basic and necessary luxury. It's just too wrapped up in being clever and throwing us off guard every chance it gets. It seems like screenwriter Bill Kelly built his entire script around his idea, and then forgot about everything else. I kept on looking for something, anything, I could find in the characters that would allow me to feel a personal connection with the characters. Aside from a few fleeting moments between Linda and Jim, I found none.

Because of this, the cast suffers terribly. Sandra Bullock is usually a very bright presence in just about every film she's appeared in, but here, she's burdened with an underdeveloped character who just runs through the story like a lab rat in a maze. She does what is expected, and she is obviously trying, but she can't breathe the tiniest bit of life out of her character. I can't imagine what she could have seen in the character, or how such a vastly underwritten role could have appealed to her. The rest of the cast are merely window dressing, and exist simply to be called upon when needed. Only Julian McMahon as Jim creates any kind of real emotion, and those scenes don't come along until much later in the film. Up until those moments, he's just as bland as everyone else. As the film whips its way through its convoluted story, the characters flash by, barely registering in our minds. We remember them by their faces, but don't know anything about them. They're just there to fill in some extra space in the background when there needs to be a crowd of people, or to give Linda someone to talk to.
Long before Premonition was over, I started to feel cheated and angry. When it was finally over, I felt even more so. The film seems to make up its own rules as it goes along, and even worse, barely stops to tell us what those rules are in the first place. It's a movie where things happen just for the sake of having something happen. Perhaps the ideas sounded intriguing on paper, which is what led to it attracting some strong talent. Too bad they didn't hire some talented script doctor to do a rewrite. I believe a good movie can be made out of just about any material. Premonition severely tested that theory.

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