Premonition

I was one of the few critics who actually enjoyed Sandra Bullock's last time travel film, The Lake House. That one was a romance in the vein of Somewhere in Time, while Premonition is a thriller more along the lines of The Forgotten.

Unfortunately, Premonition is no better than The Forgotten (in fact, it has a lot fewer "scares") and uses the same loco logic at the end to explain the terrifying time warp (terrifying for Bullock's character, if not the audience).

The story follows happy housewife Linda Hansen and her hunky hubby Jim (Nip/Tuck's Julian McMahon) in their trip through time, following — and previous to — Jim's death in a fiery car wreck. Since Linda is the only one aware that the weekdays are all out of order and sometimes repeating themselves with different outcomes, everyone else around her just thinks she's a raving nut-job.

Linda is… sort of cosmically… sent to a psychiatrist (Peter Storemare… c'mon… who'd accept a prescription from that guy?) and put on anti-psychotics. Needless to say, that doesn't help and Linda finds herself jumping all over the calendar again. Unfortunately for loopy Linda, going back and forth in time is hardly helpful — she's unable to remember what's happened in those alternate realities and is therefore powerless to stop the inevitable.

While there is interesting cinematography and jarring sound design, no amount of visual and aural accoutrements can disguise the fact that not only is Linda's life boring, but so is she. No wonder Jim goes on so many business trips (and we all know what that means!).

The only person who seems to understand what Linda is going through is her priest, who conveniently has several appropriate pages of the Bible bookmarked for her unheralded arrival — but instead of support, Linda gets a spiritual upbraiding and is sent on her way, answerless.

The same could be said for the audience, many of whom will no doubt exit the theater scratching their heads and cancelling their subscriptions to Christianity Today. Premonition is so bad, there's even a scene mirroring the time when the old nighttime soap Dallas jumped the shark with Bobby Ewing in the shower! And the ending? …I felt a queasy combination of morning sickness and Deja Vu.

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Reviewed by Staci Layne Wilson