Flatliners is the kind of remake that I’m not, in theory, opposed to seeing. While the 1990 film is decent, there is ample room for improvement. The original has a strong concept, but did little with it and was overly serious (even though the sight of Kiefer Sutherland repeatedly getting his ass kicked by a little kid is unintentionally hilarious). It also seems to have become a somewhat forgotten film, as many people that I’ve spoken to are unaware that this is a remake (though younger people seem unaware that movies and music were being made prior to their birth, but that is an old-timey rant for another day). So, in theory, I’m not against this being a thing. But, in reality, this movie blows.
Like the original, Flatliners follows a group of medical students as they intentionally kill and revive each other to learn more about the afterlife. However, they discover that intentional death may not be a good plan when they encounter visions of people that they have wronged in the past and those visions return with them to the living world to haunt them. Again, not a bad idea.
One of the overarching problems here is the performance of Ellen Page, playing the Kiefer Sutherland role, who was either just badly miscast or unable to overcome a horrible script. Sutherland played the part as an obsessive, super-driven narcissist and I bought that his character would go through with such an idea. Page is far too nice and normal in the role and I never bought for a second that her character would go to such crazy lengths to prove a vague point. The rest of the characters, which are cobbled together from traits of the characters in the original, are fine but unremarkable. I didn’t recognize the rest of the main actors and I doubt that I will remember that they were in this. Kiefer Sutherland is also in this film as a medical professor. Fun fact: a deleted scene would have established that he is still playing his character from the original, thus technically making this a sequel instead of a remake. Less fun fact: the movie would have sucked with that scene anyway.
A major problem shared by both versions is that of narrative repetition. Basically, each character goes through the death/revival process, has visions of someone that they have wronged and then are haunted (literally) by their past. The audience must watch this cycle repeat several times and this shit gets old fast. If I was tasked with writing a remake of Flatliners, one of my first decisions would be to reduce the number of characters so that the audience doesn’t have to watch the same cycle over and over again. Also, they aren’t even being haunted by people that they intentionally wronged. Most perplexing is Page’s character, who is haunted by her younger sister that died when Page texted while driving and drove their car off of a bridge (this is an unintentionally hilarious scene because the rescuers focus solely on the clearly-swimming Page and conveniently ignore her screams that her sister is still in the car). Yeah, that is an awful memory and she would feel terrible about it, but it’s not like she intentionally killed the girl. The idea that this scenario would inspire vengeance from beyond the grave is frigging ridiculous. All of the characters are like that, to varying degrees. The backstories simply don’t justify the present events.
Despite having such repetition to fill the running time, the film still introduces a bunch of nonsensical subplots and concepts to drag itself to the 90-minute mark. Unlike in the original, the characters oddly get enhanced intelligence/abilities from flatlining. Two of them suddenly have super intelligence, while another girl gets the ability to tell off her mother and really want to get fucked (I spent this portion of the film envisioning her as the least useful X-Man ever). This plot point goes nowhere and is quickly abandoned about ten minutes after being introduced. There is also a perplexing scene where they introduce the idea that there is some sort of demon behind all of this. This idea of a central villain is never explained further and wasn’t in the original. I read an interview where the director said that they were afraid that modern audiences aren’t smart enough to understand the film without some sort of monster involved. That may have some merit, but the idea just makes the film a confusing mess for anyone that didn’t eat paint chips as a kid.
This is just boring. The filmmakers seem oddly disinterested in the concept, which makes one wonder why this was made in the first place. I should not find myself checking my watch multiple times during a 90-minute horror film, but that happens when there is very little horror and the movie is desperately trying to stretch itself to feature length. If you think the concept is interesting, just watch the original. If nothing else, you will get to see Kiefer Sutherland get the shit kicked out of him by a child. The image that you just got in your head from that sentence has more entertainment value than this remake.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatliners_(2017_film)#/media/File:Flatliners_(2017).jpg
