Review By: Benjamin Lee
BenjaminLee@TheCinemaSource.com

After watching Premonition, my heart felt a little heavy.

No, not because of the overwrought, emotional finale but because I was distressed by Hollywood’s inability to make a decent B-movie anymore. A B-movie (according to The New York Times) is a ‘cheesy, campy, guilty pleasure’ and was a mainstay of drive-in movie theaters back in the 50s. Nowadays the genres which were once the staples of B-movies have become the stuff of big-budget ‘important’ blockbusters.

Science-fiction, fantasy and horror all regularly bring in large amounts of money at the box office and so the films which fall into these categories are no longer the throwaway, trashy lumps of pulp fiction which they used to be. Which brings me to Premonition, a new thriller which made me rather sad.

Linda (Sandra Bullock) has what most characters have in the first ten minutes of any studio thriller. The ‘perfect life’ which includes the ‘perfect house, husband, children, hair’ etc. But of course this is all brought down around her when a policeman comes to the door to tell her that her ‘perfect’ husband has died in a car accident. Beside herself with grief, Linda falls apart. However the next morning when she wakes, she finds her husband alive and well.

It turns out that what Linda lived the day before hasn’t actually happened yet. She’s living the seven days of a week in a mixed up order. Despite everyone around her thinking she’s crazy, Linda has to take charge of what is important in her life and to make sure, whatever the cost, her husband doesn’t get in that car…

Simply put, Premonition is like the opening scene of Final Destination but 97 minutes long. Whereas that movie picked up it’s genius concept and then ran with it immediately, the lethargic pace of Premonition is counter-productive to the suspense it’s trying to achieve. Okay so she can see into the future, we’ve seen it many times before in a movie so let’s just get the fuck on with it.

Once the filmmakers finally trust us to be able to process this complicated conceit, the film does manage to produce some effective scenes in the second act. Slate her as you may, and many do, I still consider Sandra Bullock one of the most engaging actresses working within the studio system today and she helps to make the story a lot more empathetic than it could have been.

There is a general sense that we’re never totally sure where we may end up. To reword, we’re never totally sure which one of the three endings we’ve seen before in other superior movies will crop up again. As the movie speeds up to the