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I happened to watch this 2010 movie yesterday. After watching the movie when I visited IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes, I was surprised to find that this movie was thrashed and beaten like an old rag by reviewers. Tomatometer reads 19 % and I don’t agree with that. I enjoyed watching the movie. Of course this movie is not Citizen Kane to be cherished and remembered forever. It is an ordinary flick with an ordinary cast and an ordinary storyline. Whether it is flawed? Of course. It has its flaws. Yet, whether it is enjoyable? I would say it was very much enjoyable. Let me jot down what according to me, went right and wrong with the movie.

Ups:

  1. Good cast and acting such as Paul Bettany, Dennis Quaid, and Adrianne Palicki.
  2. A good siege story set up with a Diner in the desert that is battered by demonic elements and the arrival of a “Guardian Angel”. Pun intended…
  3. The course of the movie was not at all boring and kept me glued all through its running time of one hour and forty minutes.

Downs:

  1. I felt that the biggest problem with the movie was its running time. A short time of only 1 hour and forty minutes rendered a lot of concepts incomplete. For instance:
  • The Mutiny of Michael, the Angel, and his conflict with Gabriel should have been explored better. Not all days, God decides to exterminate humans. Right?
  • The relationship between Jeep and Charlie also had a lot of scope that was wasted. That includes why an unusual name like Charlie.
  • The Tattoos in the hand of Jeep and who the prophets were also left unexplained.
  • Most importantly, the entire story revolves around a baby and yet we know nothing about the baby. Not even why this baby is the “Hope” and how he would be the savior of mankind.
  • Why the human beings who are possessed become zombies and how the entire fight happens with guns also goes unexplained.
  1. Another Forty-five minutes of run time would have given enough time for those concepts to be thoroughly explored and thereby completing the story arc. That way the movie would have got the depth that it lacks.
  2. Although action sequences are interesting, they are not gripping. Especially, the fight between Gabriel and Michael disappointed me.

Therefore, in my opinion, the movie certainly is not as bad as it is portrayed. In fact, Paul Bettany once again joined hands with Scott Stewart in 2011, for “Priest”. Although that movie also had the same premise of fighting the zombies,  I enjoyed that movie too. In fact, most of the flaws mentioned in this movie apply to that movie too. {But that is content for some other article. Right?} Amidst all the negative reviews, I can audaciously say, this movie deserves a sequel or a reboot, filling up the lacuna.