After.Life Movie Review
After.Life Movie Review
Ironically lifeless.
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2010 must be the year of cinematic harmonic convergence for actor Liam Neeson — somebody up there said, "Release the Neeson!", the heavens parted, the curtains opened, and on every film screen there is one of his movies. It's only March and already I have seen him in Chloe, Clash of the Titans, and After.Life. Coming up, he'll be seen in The A-Team and The Next Three Days, plus he's doing voices in The Wildest Dream and The Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
I don't have to see all the 2010 Neeson movies to know without a doubt that After.Life will be by far the worst. Neeson plays a morbid motician called Eliot Deacon. Ala a classier and supernaturally-suffused Jigsaw, he believes that "Life is the symptom; death is the cure" and gives the people under his knife the chance to love their lives… or lose them for good.
When waifish elementary teacher Anna Taylor (Christina Ricci) wakes up in the prep room of the funeral home, Eliot offers her the choice to live or die. Whether or not she is actually dead or a victim of a paralyzing toxin is a question posed throughout the film, but there's not much of a mystery here: After.Life is ironically lifeless.
First of all, the casting is appallingly off-base. I like all three of the main actors — Neeson, Ricci, and Justin Long as the longsuffering boyfriend (a role he seems to be a playing a lot lately) — but not one of them seems comfortable in their celluloid skins. There are no character arcs. Everyone starts off histrionic and stays at that level throughout. In one jaw-dropping moment, Long's character, a respectable lawyer, goes into an elementary school and backhands a little kid across the face in the commons, yelling "You little fuck!" and sending the boy sprawling. There are no repercussions, and later on the two characters are talking to one another as if nothing happened. And there are just plain stupid things, like Anna's car after she's wrecked and rolled it and (possibly) died inside of it, has an unsecured bobble-head doll sitting upright on the dash.
Aside from the obvious flaws in casting, story, and script, debut director Agnieska Wojtowicz-Vosloo uses all the subtlety of a bone-saw to get her points across. In spite of the grand questions of life and death proposed, the sets and setups are super-simple; I could see After.Life coming off better as stage play than a movie trying and failing to show visuals of the afterlife. The cinematography is standard Shoot A Movie 101, and aside from Ricci's impressive naked body, the lighting is unflattering to the actors.
I could nitpick After.Life to death, but suffice it to say: It's D.O.A.
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Reviewed by Staci Layne Wilson