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COUNTDOWN: A Gimmick App Not Worth Installing

COUNTDOWN: A Gimmick App Not Worth Installing

COUNTDOWN: A Gimmick App Not Worth Installing

Countdown is exactly how it looks; it’s a bloodless, badly written, competently acted affair that uses young attractive actors and the latest smartphone trends to target a young adult audience.

The premise presented here in Countdown is not exactly terrible; it brings to mind the Final Destination franchise and the clock-ticking deadline present in The Ring. I’m also not against social media and technology being a part of their stories, since I avidly defended the first Unfriended back in 2015.

The problem with Countdown is threefold: It takes itself too seriously for a PG-13 horror film, it’s full of plot and character contrivances, and it’s poorly written in getting me to care. As a result, this is a one-note non-scary ordeal that falls into the same bucket as Slender Man, The Bye Bye Man, and Truth or Dare.

Way Too Self-Serious for PG-13

This movie is literally about an app that tells you when you will die. It also confirms to the audience early on that the app is created by a demon – when I say “demon,” I literally mean those demons from the Conjuring films. And yet, the whole movie is nearly bloodless. Characters are pulled up into the air by an unseen force, then they fall back down hard enough that they die on the spot. It’s hard to keep a straight face, since the lack of blood and practical effects causes each death to have a slapstick vibe. Furthermore, each character reacts like they’re seeing something truly harrowing and traumatic.

COUNTDOWN: A Gimmick App Not Worth Installing
source: STX Entertainment

There is no reason why the tone of the film should be this serious. Ridiculous moments occur left and right, yet the film chooses to not have fun with them. It’s a tonal approach that I never got on board with. Had it been more violent and more self-aware at how preposterous the situations are, the film would have been far more entertaining, somewhere along the lines of The Cabin in the Woods and this year’s Ready or Not.

The Most Nonsensical Contrivances

The “scary” set pieces found throughout Countdown make no sense. Not only do they provide little to no suspense – I will explore more of this later – but they demand the characters to make some of the most cliché illogical decisions.

Imagine seeing a ghost in a public bathroom, and then the lights suddenly go off. Do you run out of there? Any rational human being would. If you see one of the bathroom stalls open by itself in a slow creak, that is your second queue to get the f*** out of there. Of course, one of our characters does the exact opposite; he approaches the damn stall. It’s mind-numbingly stupid.

And like you would guess, jump scares happen. Our characters get attacked and haunted by the demon behind the app. The problem is none of it matters. None of the characters are actually in danger. If you paid attention to how much time left each character has, none of the “scary” set pieces have any stakes. One of the main characters gets attacked in the public bathroom, and you know he won’t die because he still has a couple days left on his countdown. Not only are these set pieces not scary and not creative, they all lack suspense because our expectations have already been set in stone by the film’s very premise.

The Actors Try, but the Writing is all Hit-and-Miss

Elizabeth Lail tries her best with the material given. She brings everyday charm to the protagonist Quinn and there is a somewhat interesting backstory with Quinn’s sister Jordan (Talitha Bateman). Though the dialogue between them in the first and second act is atrocious, the climax gives some much-needed emotional resonance to an otherwise shallow plot. The two sisters could’ve held the film together on its own, if only the script didn’t force multiple subplots into the mix, from a phone hacker (who did give me two big laughs) and a hippie priest to a side romance and sexual harassment plotline.

COUNTDOWN: A Gimmick App Not Worth Installing
source: STX Entertainment

A couple places, the script flirts with an interesting idea over why terrible people can live a long healthy life, while good people can have little time left to live, but the writers are nowhere up to the task of truly exploring that idea to the fullest. The result is just 90 minutes of mediocrity and brief glimpses of potential, down to the last horrible cliffhanger of an ending that suggests a sequel.

Countdown: Indeed, a Time-Waster

This is the quintessential teen horror flick, made with a budget of less than $10 million, designed to profit off of its opening weekend alone. Countdown is not aggressively terrible, but it’s life-threateningly dull. It’s a movie that gets dumber and dumber the more you think about it afterwards. A lot of moments don’t make sense, and the writing is both amateurish and too self-serious to be clever or entertaining.

At the end of the day, it’s a gimmick app not worth installing. I’d say swipe away.

Did you see Countdown? What did you think of the film? Share below!

Countdown was released in theaters in the US on October 25, 2019. For all international release dates, click here.

 

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