Premonition
starring Sandra Bullock, Julian McMahon, Shyann McClure, Courtney Taylor Burgess, Nia Loing, Kate Nelligan, Marc McCaulay and Peter Stormare
written by Bill Kelly
directed by Mennan Yapo
Rating: ♦◊◊◊◊
Premonition was a little disorienting. It took me some time to figure the story line out. Based only on the title, I expected it to be a thriller predicated on a heroine who could foresee events. But as it turns out, the heroine is experiencing the days of the week during which her husband dies in a traffic accident out of order. Everything she sees is factual, but out of order, and it takes her and the audience some time to figure that out. That means that she foresees some things, but sees other things in hindsight that make sense of things she already saw. But her “premonition” does not allow her to change what she sees, since everything she sees is factual. That means the story has no happy ending. What a bummer! We know the outcome almost from the start. I did not like it, not because it had an unhappy ending but because the plot mechanism was deficient. I like Sandra Bullock. She has that girl-next-door je ne sais quoi - cute, casual, coy familiarity, like the kind of girl you can confess all your most intimate guy secrets to before embarrassingly falling in love with her - so as with Nicolas Cage’s Knowing, I am unsatisfied that this was not a better film. I don’t call it a“piece of crap” simply because Sandra Bullock is so much nicer to look at than Nicolas Cage.