Maybe I should stop watching movies just because Jonathan Rhys Meyers is in them. Last year there was Dangerous Game: The Legacy Murders, which was an entertaining wreck of a movie, and this year, it’s a Paramount Pictures’ Disquiet. The trailer looked promising, and Paramount has had some sleeper hits, like Significant Other and Honor Society last year. But watching this movie made me want to travel back in time and strip myself of my naive optimism, because it’s not very good, and it’s not even entertaining like Dangerous Game: The Legacy Murders was.
The opening scene moves quickly; one moment Sam (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) is passionately kissing his pregnant wife Sarah (Anita Brown), and the next he’s involved in a pretty serious car accident. He’s rushed to the hospital, and then spooky stuff starts to happen. He gets attacked by a random old man, whom he fights off, only to find himself being chased around by three scantily clad woman with surgical scars. The soundscape is generic, wanting to startle us into some sense of fear, when nothing on screen would even compel that.
Hospitals in general are frightening places, but the movie fails to make use of the setting in an interesting way. All we get is Sam freeing other patients, and trying to evade various attackers. Oh, there’s no signal, so Sam can’t call for help, and there’s nothing but darkness when he looks out a window.
The movie also cuts away to show us Sam puking out copious amounts of blood in the aftermath of his car accident, barely conscious as a paramedic encourages him to reach out and grab his hand. Firstly, this is the most inapt paramedic I have ever seen – who would ask this of a man bleeding profusely? Secondly, just from the brief premise I’ve given, you probably already know what this movie’s about. We’ve seen this many times, in TV shows like Lost, I even wrote a short story when I was 16 with the same exact premise.
Despite being the protagonist, Sam is barely fleshed out as a character. All we know about him are traits blatantly told to us by other characters: he’s a womanizer, a workaholic, and a self-absorbed man. In one of his heart to heart conversations with Sarah (Brown and Meyers have no credible chemistry together), she wishes he thought more about others than himself. So this ghoulish hospital he’s stuck in is a test of sorts – can he keep his wits about him and make the right choices?
Sam is accompanied by a bunch of other unremarkable characters, like a racist cop and a woman who has gone under the knife repeatedly in search of perfection. Along the way, Sam meets Virgil (Garry Chalk) and Lilith (Rachelle Goulding), who are different from the faceless orderlies and off-their-rocker patients. They both offer him direction, and it’s his choice as to whether he heads down or up towards the roof. Like I said, it doesn’t take much to figure out the bones of this entire movie.
With an ending you can see coming a mile away, uninteresting characters, and a plot which involves the same thing happening over and over again, I would suggest staying far away from this movie.
Review screener provided.
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