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Friday
09Jan2009

Movie Review - 'The Unborn'

DateFriday, January 9, 2009 at 12:25AM
The Unborn

Starring Odette Yustman, Meagan Good, and Gary Oldman
Directed by David S. Goyer
Rated PG-13

theunborn_galleryposter.jpg Hitting all the usual buttons for a modern PG-13 horror flick, The Unborn never gets your heart racing and never challenges your mind. The scares are predictable - Don't look in the mirror! Don't think everything's OK in that maintenance closet! - and the story is a real drag.

The basics (and that's all there really are here) involve a pretty college student named Casey (Odette Yustman) who has recently been haunted by a very strange dream. There's a boy with piercing blue eyes, a fetus in a jar, a bulldog wearing a mask. What does it mean? What does it mean?

She consults her friend Romy (Meagan Good), who has a book on dream interpretation, so that's nice. But while she's babysitting for neighbors one night, Casey is attacked by the four-year-old son, who declares, "Jumby wants to be born now."

Is it all connected?

This is not the typical demon baby stuff, this is unborn demon baby stuff, as we soon learn that Casey's twin brother died in utero. That's about as far as I'm will to go with The Unborn, and it should be enough for writer-director David S. Goyer. But he's not content, and adds a heaping help of evil by invoking...the Nazis! It's a real stretch, one that loses all elasticity when Goyer reaches back to the Kaballah and some arcane Hebrew mythology.

There isn't much to say about the performances in The Unborn/. Odette Yustman (Cloverfield) doesn't seem as petrified by what's going on as she should be, nor do any of her friends seem abundantly concerned. Her father just kind of leaves town never to be heard from again.

Then there's Gary Oldman. That's right: Gary Oldman. He plays a Rabbi that Casey contacts to perform an exorcism. Oh, and to translate this ancient Kaballah that was given to her by her grandmother, a character that exists only after Goyer decides that just being haunted by someone who had never been born wasn't a good enough concept.

I expected more out of The Unborn. I expected something new. Goyer's a good writer, but he's well off his game here. There's not a shred of originality here, just another scary movie that fails to scare.

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AuthorColin Boyd | | in , , | Print ArticlePrint Article | | CommentPost a Comment |

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