“It’s a great day to die!”
Flatliners is the remake, not sequel, to the film of the same name, released in 1990 with Julia Roberts and Kiefer Sutherland. However, this film oddly has Sutherland in both films. But it’s not a sequel! Flatliners tells the story of a group of medical students looking to “flatline” and resuscitate themselves in order to experience the afterlife. As the medical students experience a clarity after the flatlining, they soon find out that the immediate clarity soon wears off, leaving them with only the chaotic nightmares that surround them.
This film has so many flaws that it’s hard to really recognize where this film goes wrong. Flatliners is a convoluted mess of not knowing what type of film it truly wants to be. At the beginning we have a medical drama, full of all the lingo that even a Grey’s Anatomy fan would get jealous of. But as the film progresses, we find ourselves in more of a horror type of film. And by horror film, I mean a mediocre jump scare fest.
The actors in the film are anything but great. Two of the five actors, which are Ellen Page and Diego Luna, do a decent job of portraying their characters Courtney and Ray. But even this film is too much for decent actors such as these two, 
to have any type of redeeming factor. As for the other actors, they looked as though they just stepped on a film set for the first time. Their characters were watered down and incredibly boring. However, as I previously said, the whole film comes across as a jumbled mess, I don’t know if the characters in the film were the fault of the actors, the writing, the studio, or the director.
I can only imagine how hard it is to make a movie. When making a movie, everything has to come together. You have the director of the original Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, you have the writer of Sourcecode, you have some decent actors, what could possibly go wrong. No one knew where they wanted this film to go. Flatliners needed a concrete idea of what it was going to become. But sadly, in the end, this film is nothing but a bunch of crazy ideas that never come to fruition.
Flatliners
Directed by: Niels Arden Oplev
Starring: Ellen Page, Diego Luna, Nina Dobrev, James Norton, Kiersey Clemons, and Kiefer Sutherland
Rating:
Little Movie Reviews 