Sometimes, all that’s required to reboot the horror genre is to switch up the settings.
Goodbye haunted houses and Camp Crystal Lake, hello Afghanistan.
“The Objectice, the new-to-DVD horror film (Oct. 13), starts by relocating the horrors to the battlefield.
That wrinkle injects the genre with fresh blood, but the story’s flat pacing and dialogue leave audiences feeling drained.
The film follows a team of U.S. soldiers touching down in Afghanistan in the weeks following the 9/11 attacks. Their mission – find the heat source pulsing from within one of the country’s many mountainous landscapes.
What they find is a weapon of mass destruction they never expected.
None of the actors distinguish themselves here, and as the soldiers start dropping off in the face of an unknown foe we care less and less about the resolution.
A few anti-war messages sneak through, but the moments are interwoven nicely into the scenes and never stop the film in its tracks. Sadly, the sagging narrative does that all by itself.
Without much in the way of scares, we’re left only with a mystery to solve, one that delivers little satisfaction or shocks.
Three times the action … and confusion
“Triangle” unites three Hong Kong directors (Tsui Hark, Ringo Lam and Johnnie To) to tell one tale of a heist gone horribly wrong. But in combining the directors’ handiwork – the story is told through their three separate pieces later fused together – we get far less than the sum of their respective talents.
The film, just released on DVD, follows three pals eager to score some fast cash. They’re about to help out some local crooks with a quick robbery when they meet a stranger who tips them off to an even bigger target.
They manage to pull off the latter, although not without a few darkly funny moments. But their friendships take a pounding when outside forces conspire to take their riches away.
The film starts with promise, but by cementing three separate stories together as one too much material gets shoved aside or treated poorly.
Character motivations aren’t fully explained, and the mysterious tone of the first third is replaced by generic action/adventure sequences which add precious little to what we’ve seen before on screen.
“Triangle” is beautiful to look at, but it ultimately can’t live up to its gimmicky roots.
(Photo: U.S. soldiers are on the hunt for a mysterious heat signal in “The Objective”/IFC Films)
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I'm an award-winning journalist and film critic with more than a decade of experience in newspapers, magazines and the Web. I'm a member of the Broadcast Film Critics Association, the Washington, DC Area Film Critics Association and the Denver Film Critics Society.
