Movie Review: Rings – How Julia tries to save Holt and herself from a not too pleasant fate is what the film is about.
Rings
RingsDir: F. Javier Gutiérrez
Cast: Johnny Galecki, Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz, Alex Roe
Rating: *1/2
What's it about:
A plane crashes after, mid-air, two passengers discover that they've watched a video they probably shouldn't have and a familiar entity from that video (named Samara) comes for them.
A while later, you see that the video in question is on a VHS tape at a garage sale. A professor named Gabriel (Galecki) picks it up and soon has his students checking it out on an experimental neuroscience programme.
Meanwhile, a girl named Julia (Lutz) sees off her boyfriend Holt (Roe) to college. They promise to Skype to each other often, and when this doesn't happen and she gets a weird video call from a woman named Skye using his computer, asking him not to look at a video, she rushes to him.
She meets Skye who tries to force her into watching the video.
And if you don't know what happens when you do, you've clearly not seen the trailer or the film's posters.
How Julia tries to save Holt and herself from a not too pleasant fate is what the film is about.
What's hot:
Certain scenes help you relate to the trapped feeling Julia and Holt sense. But on the whole, the film is woefully short of scares.
What's not:
You've "been down this road" a little too often. Familiarity died need contempt here. Galecki (Leonard of Big Bang Theory) remains an intellectual, but a slightly cuckoo one in this film. It doesn't help that he's the only known name in the first half, followed by Vincent D'Onofrio in the second. Their performances are severely limited by the predictable script which essentially has newcomers Roe (The 5th Wave) and Lutz in the foreground.
What to do:
Should you watch it and will you die if you do? Most certainly! Of boredom.
