But even while it sets up a sequel, it doesn’t outstay its lifespan. The script is loaded with supporting caricatures – wacky curse-obsessed clergyman, geeky tech expert, etc – and it ultimately feels distracted by its own ticking clock. (Dec once made a comedic short about the Oscar winner.) Creatively, the script throws several complications at our hero, including a dead mother, a rebellious younger sister and a handsy doctor who corners her in a dark room. ‘Countdown’s Elizabeth Lail, as a nurse who wants to get to the bottom of things, joins their company she’s got a certain Jennifer Lawrence scrappiness. (It’s a shame that writer-director Justin Dec didn’t think to address the real scourge of smartphone use: swiftly draining batteries.) And when the moment of truth comes, it’s over in a flash of demonic-yet-PG-13-safe violence.Īs proven by Mary Elizabeth Winstead in ‘Final Destination 3’ or the spunky Jessica Rothe in ‘Happy Death Day’, these fate-driven, high-concept horror flicks can be redeemed by a committed central performance. You can’t delete it or swap phones the app will find you. Several comically glib teens download the title app – its Satan-via-Steve-Jobs icon is the funniest thing in the film – which tells them when they’re going to die, to the second, with scary accuracy. The scares are easy, nothing that surprises you, nothing unexpected, the sort of easy tepid and bloodless fare that teen audiences can enjoy and forget moments later.Why do people go to the movies just to look at their phones? If the generic, not-entirely-unscary ‘Countdown’ doesn’t quite answer that, it at least distracts us: now we go to the movies to watch other people look at their phones. I wanted the idea to work as I thought it had potential but Justin Dec’s directorial moves are all by the standard playbook. The story also feels distorted out of shape in order to include scenes with Peter Facinelli as a doctor who sexually harasses all the nurses – it is a subplot that has no purpose in the film other than to nod to contemporary politics. When it comes to explanations, all that Dec does is reach for hoary old cliches about curses, of having the teens seek help from a Catholic priest and eventually confront a demon. There seems little thought gone into the premise beyond the creation of a series of arbitrary rules – the group seem to arrive out of thin air at the deduction that if they prove the prediction wrong it will cause all the curses to end. The disappointment of the film is that Justin Dec has made minimal effort to flesh out the bones of the essential premise. Elizabeth Lail with a mobile app that predict how long she has to live Prior to this, there had been Bedeviled (2016) about a demonic app that kills people and the Italian-made You Die: Get the App, Then Die (2018) about an app that has to be transferred to someone else’s phone before it kills you. The film feels like a variant on Final Destination (2000) or one of its sequels updated for the mobile user generation, albeit without the array of novelty deaths that made those films entertaining. He had earlier made the basis of this as a five-minute short film Countdown (2016) and then received funding to expand it to full length.Ĭountdown is a single concept film – teens download an app that tells them when they are going to die. Dec had worked as a production assistant on various films and tv shows since the late 2000s and made several short films during this time. Teaming up with fellow user Matt Monroe, she seeks to understand what is behind the app and how to prevent their deaths.Ĭountdown – no relation to the early Robert Altman Space Mission film Countdown (1967) or the twenty or so other films with the same title – was a directorial debut for Justin Dec. Richard Jefferson and Jay Williams were brought in to replace Chauncey Billups, with the network retaining Jalen Rose and Paul Pierce. Using it herself, she discovers that it gives her only three days to live and then that she has voided the user agreement by using this knowledge to avoid her fate. In August 2019, Richard Deitsch reported that Beadle was being dropped from the program, and that her assignment would be split between Rachel Nichols and Maria Taylor. His nurse Quinn Harris puzzles over what happened during the course of which she discovers Countdown. He is taken to hospital with his broken leg where he is then killed by a demonic force. She is then attacked and killed in her own home, while Evan goes on to crash in the accident that would have killed her. The app abruptly informs her that she has contravened the user agreement. Wary of this, she declines to take a ride home with her drunken boyfriend Evan. Courtney is disturbed when hers tells her she has only three hours left. Courtney is at a party where her friends amuse themselves by downloading the mobile phone app Countdown that tells them how long they have to live.
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