Review: Countdown (2019)

Countdown (2019)

Rated PG-13 for terror, violence, bloody images, suggestive material, language and thematic elements

Score: 2 out of 5

I'm disappointed with Countdown, the latest "evil technology" horror movie to come out of Hollywood. Not because it's a bad movie, mind you. I was expecting it to be bad. In fact, I was expecting it to be truly terrible, the kind of horror movie that, like Truth or Dare and Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension before it, is so completely ineffective at what it sets out to do that it becomes an unintentional comedy, the kind that you laugh at instead of with. Instead of a good one for Bad Movie Night, however, Countdown winds up coming so close to being a good movie on so many occasions that it's just disappointing watching it fall short at every turn. Interested more in soap opera than anything, Countdown had a likable cast and plenty of moments that, on their own, were effective, but never found a way to either pull them together into a good movie or just jump into the abyss and deliver a memorably awful one. It was the worst kind of bad movie: a boring one that had the seeds of an interesting one buried within.

The basic premise is what initially gave me hope that this would be one of those trash classics, in no small part because it was rooted in one of the most stereotypical hacky Hollywood horror premises: a horror movie built around new technology. For every Unfriended that actually manages to pull it off, there are half a dozen Unfriended: Dark Webs, Friend Requests, or Smileys that just embarrass themselves trying to cash in on the latest technology. This film brings all of that into the age of smartphones, its premise built around a haunted app that lets you know the exact time at which you are going to die, right down to the second, in something of a mix of Final Destination and The Ring. You get the requisite tech geek character who exists to deliver technobabble about smartphones, the requisite teenager who's addicted to her smartphone and of course downloaded the evil app the moment she heard about it, and the requisite scenes of phones functioning in really weird ways that are not at all how phones are supposed to operate. And yet, it felt like it was going through the motions of this kind of bad movie. The technobabble is just boilerplate exposition, not some truly awful "too cool for school" crap. It never tries to make any kind of point about the teenage sister's phone use to fumble some ham-fisted message about technology leaving us alienated from each other. It has nothing like Friend Request's reference to Black Mirror that did nothing but invite unfair comparisons. This movie could've had me rolling in my seat laughing, but instead, it played its dumb premise far too straight to either elevate it or make it entertainingly bad.

All of my enjoyment came from the things around that premise. There were so many moments when it felt as though the film was, in spite of itself, getting good, and they had to do with two specific characters. The first is the priest, played by P. J. Byrne in a role that I swear had to have been written with someone like Kevin Smith or Seth Rogen in mind. This guy is the polar opposite of your usual horror movie priest; instead of a dour warrior in the fight against darkness, he's a guy who put on the cloth mainly because he was a fanboy of esoteric and occult mythology and treats the subject like a fanboy of comic books or fantasy literature. He was the comic relief here, and easily my favorite character by far, always livening up the proceedings with how he treats a battle with a demon (and yes, the app is demonic) like this is something he's been waiting to do all his life after a lifetime of Dungeons & Dragons campaigns. The other was the plot involving Peter Facinelli as the sleazy Dr. Sullivan, a guy who sexually assaults the heroine Quinn and the other female nurses at the hospital where he works and uses his power and prestige to silence them. This whole subplot was actually handled nicely, focusing on Quinn's feeling of powerlessness and frustration and juxtaposing it with her fight to escape the "deadline" that the app has imposed on her -- and eventually coming together with the main plot in a creative way, even if, until then, it felt like it came out of a different movie. Facinelli does a great job giving off a surface-level authoritativeness that makes you understand how he got away with his abuses for so long, one that slips away and reveals the little creep underneath once he's alone in a room with a woman.

The rest of the cast was decent. I liked Elizabeth Lail as the heroine Quinn and Jordan Calloway as the male lead/romantic interest Matt, a guy who also downloaded the app and is fighting his own curse who has a chance encounter with Quinn at a phone shop. The direction, unfortunately, wasn't up to snuff, and showed little creativity, especially when it came to the all-important scares. This is a PG-13 horror movie in the worst way, reliant on CG monsters and effects and not really all that effective at building up real tension; only in one scene, where the demon exploits Matt's tragic backstory in order to get him, did it really pull it off, and even then you could tell how it was going to go. The scares weren't egregiously bad, but all too often, they felt generic.

The Bottom Line

I would've enjoyed this movie a lot more if it had been either better or worse, especially because of how many times it almost went in either direction with either broad camp or real depth. Instead, it lacked ambition and wound up as just a generic teen horror cheapie.