Untitled Document
I had a premonition about Sandra Bullock’s
latest film, which just happens to be called Premonition. I sensed that this was going to be another misguided
effort by an actress with a career built on half-baked movies. Regrettably,
I was right. I can think of no other actress of Bullock’s stature who
has starred in more awful films. From the totally inane (The Lake House) to the
unintentionally melodramatic (28 Days) and the severely overrated (Crash), the actress continues to work despite a string of
stinkers for which there is no deodorant strong enough. Premonition, just like Lake House, deals with a
couple whose relationship is toyed with by time. Bullock is Linda Hanson,
an upper-middle-class stay-at-home mom who is told one day that her
husband, Jim (Julian McMahon), has died in a car accident. Problem is, she
wakes up the next morning to find her hubby sipping coffee in the kitchen
as if nothing has happened . . . and it hasn’t, yet. Linda, who first
dismisses this all as a bad dream until this sequence of events
happens again, sets out to find some answers to what’s going
on. Unfortunately, it takes her 1 hour and 35 minutes of screen time to get
a clue and then spring into action. This is the sort of movie that’s hard to write
about without giving away its surprises, though doing so, in this case,
could be considered a public service. Time travel, a lack of adherence to
religious beliefs on Linda’s part, and myriad other odd occurrences
all supposedly give us clues to the mystery. Unfortunately, this is a
jigsaw puzzle minus the key pieces in the middle. Equally frustrating is
the notion that Premonition might have represented a good time at the cineplex if only
it had taken on a campy tone — something apparently beyond
Bullock’s range.
This article appears in Mar 15-21, 2007.
