Countdown (2019) STX/Horror RT: 90 minutes Rated PG-13 (terror, violence, bloody images, suggestive material, language, thematic elements) Director: Justin Dec Screenplay: Justin Dec Music: Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans Cinematography: Maxime Alexandre Release date: October 25, 2019 (US) Cast: Elizabeth Lail, Jordan Calloway, Talitha Bateman, Peter Facinelli, Dillon Lane, Tichina Arnold, Tom Segura, Lana McKissack, Anne Winters, Matt Letscher, P.J. Byrne, Valente Rodriguez, Louisa Abernathy, Charlie McDermott, Jonny Berryman. Box Office: $25.6M (US)/$48M (World)
Rating: *
The characters in Countdown keep checking their phones to see how long they have to live. In similar fashion, I kept checking my phone to see how much more of this terrible teen horror movie I had to endure. I can honestly say this is one time the clock on my phone’s home screen was more interesting than what was happening on-screen at any given moment. In its entire 90-minute running time, Countdown fails to conjure up a single scare or tiny thrill. It’s another lame PG-13 fright flick aimed at teens too young to know better than to waste their allowances on low-grade dreck like this. Chances are most of them have never seen a real horror movie which Countdown most assuredly is NOT.
Let’s call Countdown what it is; a blatant, idiotic, toned-down rip-off of Final Destination that doesn’t even have the decency to allow its characters to die interesting deaths. One of the main selling points of the Final Destination series is that each character’s demise was an elaborate, Rube Goldberg-esque scenario that usually involved a fair amount of bloodletting. The few deaths in Countdown are boring and mostly blood-free which I suppose makes sense since the characters are equally uninteresting. Movies like this are generally dumb, but Countdown takes it a step further by initially implying it’s going to make a statement about how technology has completely dominated every aspect of our lives only to drop it in favor of the same tired horror tropes we’ve seen a thousand times before.
In the opening scene, a group of drunken college students at a party play a drinking game that involves an app one of them stumbled across. It’s called Countdown and supposedly predicts when the user is supposed to die. Of course, ALL of them sign up, blindly agreeing to the terms of service. One of them, Courtney (Winters, 13 Reasons Why), learns she has less than three hours to live. She’s so freaked, she walks home alone rather than let her drunken boyfriend Evan (Lane, Boogeyman Pop) drive her. She receives a notification on her phone that she’s broken the “user agreement”. She makes it home, but is killed by an unseen entity in her bathroom. Meanwhile, Evan crashes his car and a tree branch goes through the windshield right where Courtney would have been sitting. Really? Come on, even a drunk person can see that coming a mile off.
The main action of Countdown centers on Quinn (Lail, Dead of Summer), a nurse at the hospital where Evan is admitted for surgery after the crash. He’s worried because the app says he has less than a day to live. Quinn tries to comfort him, but to no avail. For reasons that defy all logic, she downloads the app on her phone only to discover she has three days to live. Initially dismissive, her attitude changes when Evan is killed in the stairwell by the same entity while trying to bail. Another violator of the user agreement bites the dust. No matter what she tries, a now-scared Quinn cannot delete the app from her phone. When she buys a new phone, Countdown downloads itself. It looks like Quinn is screwed unless she finds a way to beat Death.
It goes without saying that Quinn’s personal life is a mess. She and her younger sister Jordan (Bateman, Annabelle: Creation) are estranged following the death of their mother. Given this fact, it’s a safe bet that Jordan will go against her sister’s advice and download Countdown. Sure enough, she’s supposed to die just a few minutes before Quinn. With the help of Matt (Calloway, Black Lightning), a guy she meets at the phone store, they race to find a way to escape the clutches of the Grim Reaper before the clock runs out. They go to a young priest (Byrne, Big Little Lies) who figures out an ancient demon is behind it all.
Everything I’ve told you thus far about Countdown is stupid and nonsensical. That’s bad enough on its own. It’s made worse by an offensive #MeToo subplot involving Quinn being sexually harassed by a handsome doctor (Facinelli, the Twilight series) who turns around and accuses her of being the aggressor when she rebuffs his advances (in front of a comatose patient, no less). First, it’s unnecessary; it doesn’t add anything to the plot. Without a legitimate reason for being included, it comes off as crass and exploitative. Second, it’s handled poorly. At a meeting with hospital directors, Quinn is suspended without being given an opportunity to speak in her own defense. Horror movies, by definition, are not realistic. HOWEVER, if you’re going to address a topic as serious as workplace sexual harassment, do it in a realistic manner. There’s no way such a meeting would go down as it does here. That is grounds for a massive lawsuit on the part of the falsely accused.
If not for the aforementioned subplot, I could almost believe that Countdown is a big joke. I say almost because it generates as many laughs as it does scares and that number is a big fat zero. It’s a tremendous bore and an abject failure on every level. The characters, in addition to being uninteresting and poorly developed, are exceptionally stupid. They put themselves in so many deadly situations while trying to escape Death that you start to think their deaths would be mercy killings as they’re too dumb to live. The acting is atrocious. The only mildly interesting thing about any cast member is how closely Lail resembles Jennifer Lawrence which is amusing since J. Law wouldn’t be caught dead (if you’ll pardon the phrasing) in a movie this bad. The storyline is thoroughly predictable especially if you know how to read movies. Note how writer-director Justin Dec, making his feature film debut, takes the time early on to show a couple of things that will surely play big parts in the climax. He all but telegraphs the ending which is a foregone conclusion to begin with anyway.
Countdown is a textbook hack job. It’s dull, lazy and completely moronic. It doesn’t have a single brain cell to its name. If anything, it kills brain cells. It’s a colossal waste of time, resources and space that ends with the threat of a sequel. If this movie makes money, I dread the day I have to sit through Countdown 2.0. Is there an app that’ll give me back the 90 minutes of my life I wasted on this insufferable piece of stupidity?
