After almost a year and a half of sitting on the studio's shelf and being shuffled through various release dates, The Reaping is finally hitting your local theater. Judging by the film on display, I think it's safe to say that the time it spends at the theater will be much briefer than the journey it took to get there. While not completely unsalvageable and without merit, the film is a major disappointment considering the subject matter and some of the acting talent involved. Much like the sequels that were spawned from films like The Omen and The Exorcist, The Reaping tries to mix Biblical prophecies and spirituality with horror, only to come up short thanks to a tedious screenplay that never thrills as much as it should.

Ever since the death of her family, former Christian missionary Katherine Winter (Hilary Swank) has devoted her life to debunking miracles that have been reported the world over. She believes that she can disprove any miraculous happening with science and logic, but when she is summoned to the small backwater town of Haven, she finds that she might be in over her head. She is brought there by a local doctor named Doug (David Morrissey) to investigate why the town's river has turned blood-red. The God-fearing townsfolk think that it is part of the 10 plagues spoken of in the Bible. As much as Katherine tries to explain the phenomenon, she can't quite deny something unusual is going on when frogs start falling from the sky, seemingly-healthy livestock cattle suddenly grow ill and die, and swarms of flies and locusts start popping up seemingly out of nowhere. It seems that the people of Haven blame these occurrences on a young girl named Loren McConnell (AnnaSophia Robb from Bridge to Terabithia), whose family is believed to be involved with a secret Satanic cult. The fact that she was seen standing over the murdered body of her older brother in the river mere seconds before it turned red and all the problems began certainly doesn't help. With an angry mob building in town and Katherine running out of scientific explanations to debunk what's going on, there seems little doubt that there's something much more powerful at work than anyone could have guessed.

You certainly have to give the character of Katherine credit for sticking to her guns as long as she does, trying to disprove what's going on around her. I don't think it's until almost the 70-minute mark when she sees little Loren standing outside with thousands of locusts swarming around everywhere that she starts to seriously consider the possibility that what's happening in this town is not natural. I personally would have been catching the next bus out of town when the frogs started falling and flies started appearing seemingly out of nowhere on my food. The Reaping certainly has an intriguing premise, and is able to hold our attention for a little while. Unfortunately, director Stephen Hopkins (1998's Lost in Space film) does not seem very interested in developing upon the ideas that the premise brings forth. Instead, we're treated to a number of jump scares where people and objects leap at the camera from out of the dark while a loud noise on the soundtrack assaults our eardrums. We also get the standard people wandering around in dark places they obviously shouldn't be ("The entire town is being ravaged by killer insects! I know! I'll hide in that scary old cemetery, and duck in that dark and spooky mausoleum!"), and people talking in hushed whispers as they read quotes from the Bible about prophecies and the antichrist. If it feels like you've seen it all before, you probably have, as the film shamelessly lifts from past spiritual horror films. Disappointingly, the screenplay by twin siblings Carey and Chad Hayes (2005's House of Wax remake) is not even interested in using the Biblical Plague theme as anything more than elaborate set pieces. When your horror movie is about plagues and Biblical prophecies, and you have to rely on cheap jump scares to frighten your audience, you're probably not taking the right approach.

The film falls into a predictable pattern of scenes that usually follow in the same order. There's a Plague, Katherine tries to disprove it, there's some ominous talk and an appearance by little Loren, maybe a "spooky" and sloppily edited dream sequence or vision or two, and then the cycle repeats with another Plague. It settles on this predictable chain until the end where we get a confusing special effects-heavy climax that somehow manages to make fire raining from the sky on the town not very interesting. The town of Haven is filled with a parade of Southern-fried stereotypes that seem to exist simply because every movie set in the deep South has to have the character types on display. Katherine at least is a sympathetic heroine, but I'm not sure if most of this comes from the screenplay or from Swank's performance. While this obviously is not her best work, she does seem to be giving the role more effort than it probably deserves. She even gets in an effective scene or two, such as when she's talking to her associate Ben (Idris Elba from Daddy's Little Girls) about the legendary Plagues spoken of in the Bible, and disproving them one-by-one using her own rationality. The movie needed more scenes like this, scenes that actually dug into the material and could spark discussion or debate, instead of another horror film built around jump scares and creepy little girls. Speaking of creepy little girls, talented child actress AnnaSophia Robb is given very little to do except to narrow her eyes and stare at the camera ominously in nearly every scene. She doesn't even get any real dialogue until the film's final moments. While she certainly is trying her best to come across as eerie and suspicious, we've seen this "creepy little girl" act too many times since 2002's The Ring for it to be effective anymore.
The Reaping obviously has a lot of ambitious thoughts in its head, but it is betrayed by a cliched and sometimes confusing story. Throw in the fact that the camera work is sometimes a bit too shaky for its own good, and the film disappoints even further. This is a story that should have captivated and brought forth questions. Instead, all it does is frustrate. We do wind up asking questions, but most of them are directed at the sloppy storytelling or the poor decisions the characters sometimes make. While not the flat-out failure that one would expect after its numerous missed release dates and stories of up to the last minute behind the scenes editing and tampering, The Reaping still manages to fall far short of its full potential.

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