Horsemen (2009)
Review by Chris Jacques
Wow, what a piece of shit.
For the sake of actually writing an article about this abortion of a film, I’ll extrapolate and embellish upon my blanket statement to begin this piece, but this is far more press than such a movie deserves. I didn’t buy this, didn’t rent it: some would say I magically got it, and I’m thanking the deity of my choice at the moment that magic exists.
Any horror/thriller fan with his or her salt has seen the now-considerably-a-classic 1995 film Se7en, and most probably remember being blown away by the style, the story, the acting of all parties (yes, even Brad Pitt; matter of fact, this movie did much more to solidify Pitt as a moderately decent actor in my eyes than absolutely anything else he’s ever done) and that fantastic 3rd act that no one saw coming. Horsemen comes along 14 years later, and instead of Brad or Morgan Freeman or even some random guy with a knife contraption attached to his miserable cock, we lucky souls are treated to the dramatic stylings of one Dennis Quaid, who hasn’t been in something I really liked since I saw Dreamscape five years ago. Before that, the only other things in which I can remember him being an enjoyable screen presence are the 1976 bicycling epic Breaking Away or the still-amazing Enemy Mine.
Well, for Horsemen, our boy Dennis is a cop, a single dad taking care of his two disenfranchised kids who just want to spend a second with this man whose job as a detective always seems to get in the way of his ability to love his children. He’s so torn, damn it! He’s going to fall off the edge! So tense!
Actually, it’s a flatline on a heart monitor that barely seems to jump at all. A good 1/2 of the script is lifted straight from Hellraiser: Inferno. I’m actually quite the fan of that flick, but when Horsemen director Jonas Akerlund (perhaps best-known for 2002′s drug ride Spun) and writer Dave Callahan combine their forces of mediocrity with that of the perennially vanilla Quaid, it’s as if they were making a pasta dish out of a movie and dumped the linguini down the drain instead of the water.
The twists in this movie never matter, the viewer never cares about the character and when the big reveal is money-shotted all over us like bound victims at a bukkake “party,” we’re left about as glazed over in our minds as is that poor bukkake girl ‘s (or boy’s) face. To quote George Carlin, “not good…and definitely not for sharing.”
So, Fincher’s Seven was better than this. Kiss the Girls and Along Came a Spider were better than this. There was a 1998 direct-to-cable Rutger Hauer flick called Bone Daddy that surpassed the dreck that is Horsemen, Christopher Lambert starred in yet another brick in the serial killer wall, called Resurrection which was superior to this, and Willem Dafoe’s murder mystery from last year, Anamorph, beat this movie in a foot race by a country mile, even with its many faults and completely out-of-nowhere ending. One is left wondering why this movie ever even needed to be made; it seems like a waste of time, if not talent, for everyone involved, including Clifton Gonzales Gonzales…err, I mean “Clifton Collins Jr..”
With the end of this film, I felt concurrently thrilled and woefully disappointed. I’ll gladly waste my time for horror, good or bad, just to see it. I will always give horror a chance, despite the fact that I’ve been so often burned by cashing-in directors who absolutely don’t give a shit what they release (Tobe Hooper, for example), or productions so painfully independent that the best story in the world won’t save the gem of an idea from the gem-cutters who will ultimately make it worthless. Horsemen is definitely one of those movies that is truly worthless. Time, finite time that we poor humans will never have returned to us, is not meant to be spent on such incredibly uninspired rehashing as this film.
If I gave firm star reviews to movies, Horsemen would get a zero; not a zero for being horrible, but a zero for being absolutely irrelevant. Somewhere out there is a first-timer with one Hell of a script, banging on every door in Hollywood and having far below the bare minimum of luck in getting produced…but this slick, smooth piece of shit not only gets green-lit and made, but it even gets a bit of a marketing campaign put behind it? No thanks, Hollywood. Keep your Dennis Quaid…and don’t try this kind of bullshit again. Your few remaining supporters don’t appreciate it one bit.
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