As
Above, So Below
Perdita
Weeks stars as
Scarlett – some sort of sexy young female version of Indiana
Jones who has spent her life trying to find The Philosopher’s
Stone. For those of you who don’t know (or only heard about
it from Harry Potter), The Philosopher’s Stone is an ancient
legendary alchemical substance thought to turn other metals into gold,
which would make the owner quite rich and powerful. It might also be
some sort of key to immortality, yadda, yadda, yadda.
Yet, Scarlett is not in this for the money. She wants to prove her
father, who also sought the stone (and who is not played by Sean
Connery), was not crazy for believing he was on the right track to find
it when tragedy struck.
Based on new evidence she dramatically has discovered, Scarlett
believes the stone to be hidden in an uncharted and unknown section of
the Paris Catacombs – a vast underground network of tunnels
containing the remains of six million unlucky souls. To get to the
right location, our heroine will need a team that knows the Catacombs,
and a former friend (or possibly more), George (Ben Feldman), who knows
how to translate the various clues (and do stuff he doesn’t
want to do when he makes googly eyes at Scarlett).
And, because this is a movie that doesn’t have one original
idea in it, the adventure is being captured on video by a
documentarian, Benji (Edwin Hodge).
As they make their way further into the lowly depths of the earth, this
group of intrepid travelers encounters all sorts of strange characters,
and what the writers were hoping would be spooky situations.
Can they find The
Philosopher’s Stone?
Who will live?
Who will die?
Are you still reading?
“Abandon hope all ye who enter here,” is what
should be written above the entrance to your local Cineplex showing
this movie.
Forget about logic.
Forget about scary situations.
Forget about being entertained.
Forget buying a ticket.
Writer Drew Dowdle and writer/director John Erick Dowdle have a decent
idea, which is poorly executed. Instead of being frightening, thrilling
and creepy, As Above, So Below
becomes yet another in a long, tired, overexposed line of failed and
flawed Found Footage movies.
The audience is led to believe each character is facing some dark and
horrible secret about their past as each one confronts danger and
possible death, but The Dowdles don’t uniformly apply this to
each person. The selectivity of using this tactic with some characters,
but not others, leads to a failure in logic and structure that dooms
what could have been a cool premise.
We lose the rhyme and reason for why action is happening on the screen
and what is happening to whom. Some people are facing danger tied to
some deep dark secret (that wasn’t all that well developed in
the first place). Others just die because it’s time to wake
up the audience.
Then, they fail to scare us. John Erick Dowdle doesn’t build
up the suspense and spookiness through the first act of the movie, so
the few scares that pop up in the second and third acts of As
Above, So
Below are nothing more than sloppy and poorly conceived attempts at
shock (which better translate into failed attempts to wake up the
audience). These are afterthoughts instead of being the keys to a well
planned movie that ties together neatly and in a way that makes the
audience feel it was clever.
As Above, So
Below is a horribly missed
opportunity full of stock characters and situations sprinkled with
hollow shocks and scares.
As
Above, So Below is rated R for bloody
violence/terror, and language throughout.
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