Movie Review: Rings

Rings * ½ / *****

Directed by: F. Javier Gutiérrez.

Written by: David Loucka and Jacob Estes and Akiva Goldsman based on the novel by Kôji Suzuki.

Starring: Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz (Julia), Alex Roe (Holt), Johnny Galecki (Gabriel), Vincent D'Onofrio (Burke), Aimee Teegarden (Skye), Bonnie Morgan (Samara).

 

 It really should not be possible to screw up a Ring movie this bad. After all, this franchise has supported two Hollywood films, and I don’t even want to know how many Japanese films, and is relatively simple and straight forward in its setup and execution. You watch a video, and seven days later, you die – unless you can get someone else to watch the video, and take your place. That’s it, that’s all – you should not be able to mess than up, because the idea is so simple, and so creepily effective, you don’t need anything else. The one thing you could do to mess the whole thing up is this – you could make a film that tries to explain everything about the video, its evil, and the how and why it’s all happening. So, of course, that’s exactly what Rings does.

 

The plot of this movie is simple – college freshman Holt (Alex Roe) allows himself to be drawn into the experiment by one of his professors, Gabriel (Johnny Galecki). Gabriel stumbled upon the video at a thrift sale, and figured out how it works – what he wants to do is get a whole lot of stupid college kids to watch the video, and then observe what happens to them over the seven days – getting someone else to “watch” their video before time runs out. He thinks in doing so, he could prove the existence of the soul – or the afterlife, or something. And of course, it’s a stupid idea. The real protagonist of the film is Holt’s girlfriend Julia (Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz, who didn’t become a horror star here, but will when people get to see her work in Revenge, which I saw and loved at TIFF this year) – who gets worried when he doesn’t respond to various phone calls and texts, and heads out to his university to meet him. Through a series of events too complicated to get into – she ends up seeing the video as well, but hers is different than the one everyone else sees – and it doesn’t look like it will be possible to copy it and show it to anyone else. She refuses to do that anyway – and decides to use her seven days instead trying to piece together the mystery behind the videotape – and therefore stop it, she hopes. She and Holt end up travelling to a small town not far from the university (how convenient) where the residents have tried to bury what they know.

 

This was not a horror franchise that needed any real explanation behind the video – at least not more than we already had. Stephen King is a master of the horror genre, and even he struggles (sometimes mightily) to come up with ways to explain all the supernatural crap that happens in his novels – which often makes the endings the weakest parts of these stories. They don’t need an explanation anyway – explanations are not inherently scary. The director of the film is F. Javier Gutierrez – who tries very hard to ape what Gore Verbinski did with 2002’s The Ring (and Hideo Nakata did with The Ring 2 – and the original Ringu) in terms of visual style. What he’s never quite able to do however is build any suspense – or any sense of surprise. To a certain extent, this isn’t entirely his fault – the entire film is essentially exposition – how the hell can you make that scary. But he doesn’t do himself many favors either.

 

This was a series that I think we all assumed was head. The 2002 Hollywood original was a surprise hit when it came out – and the 2005 sequel was a disappointment. In Japan, where the story originated, they made a few more – but other than Ringu, nothing really broke through here. The series had its moment, and then moved on. It should have stayed there – unless they had something interesting to say. They didn’t.