Countdown (PG-13)

“Countdown” is a horror film. Or at least it tries its best.

Look. I saw the movie. I didn’t like, you aren’t going to see it. Let’s get this over with. 

Actually, before I get into this movie we need to talk about something. I need someone to tell me how “Countdown” can make almost nine million dollars its opening weekend having been released in 2,600 theatres, when “Missing Link” only made five million dollars opening in 3,000. Get it together people. This is why we can’t have nice things. But anyway, let’s talk about “Countdown.”

First of all, the rules don’t make sense. “Countdown” is what I like to call Mechanical Horror, or Game Horror. It’s when the thrills come from watching a cast of characters figure out the rules to some curse or mystery that they then need to work within or find a loophole out of to survive. “Final Destination” is the best example of this. So what are the rules in this film? The main one is that once you download the app, you can’t use the knowledge to change your fate. 

And right away we have a problem. In a pure deterministic sense, which the app would need to be in order to function, this should be impossible. This issue is similar to the one many time travel movies have. It’s a kind of time loop where if the app says I’m going to die in five hours, why wouldn’t it have taken into account that I downloaded the app and saw that I was going to die in five hours? If the death clock is thrown off by me having seen the death clock and making different decisions than… I dunno that’s just kind of dumb.

It definitely isn’t interesting to watch and it feels like the app is cheating when, after you don’t hop into a car driven by your drunk boyfriend, the app accuses you of breaking the terms of service and sends a demon to kill you anyway. Like, well if there’s no difference what’s even the point? You either die in the car crash or a demon kills you, but why’s the app getting upset that she made a slight variation to her life, something she was likely going to do regardless of the app?

These aren’t the types of things I’m meant to be thinking about during a horror film. At the end of the film – Spoiler Alert – the main character realizes that since she knows when she’s going to die, if she just kills herself immediately that means the app was wrong which will break the curse. So she pumps herself with morphine but then has her sister pump her with… anti-morphine to come back. So she didn’t really die but it works anyway because of reasons. 

The movie wasn’t all bad though. The comic relief characters were actually really great. P.J. Byrne as Father John, a Catholic priest/huge bible nerd that listens to trap music and burns incense like pot was the boost this movie needed; too bad he’s only in a couple scenes. Tom Segura definitely wins for laugh-to-line ratio. He had great delivery and made the most out of every second of screen time he had. He played a smart-alecky phone repair shop owner. That’s it. But he worked. 

Oh yeah, there’s a sexual harassment subplot that has our main character, an intern at a hospital, being assaulted by a male doctor. The doctor then lies and tells everyone that it was actually the woman who moved on him. That was way more frightening then any of the jump scares in this movie. All the scares are jump scares, by the way. 

The acting was subpar, the camera work was passable; but, the writing was bland and forgettable. This is yet another in a long line of painfully mediocre films out of STX Entertainment. Unfortunately “Countdown” made more than 3 times its budget so… I can’t wait to see… “Countdown 2.0” or whatever they call the sequel. And yes, they set up a sequel. Of course they did.