The Gazette-Enterprise

There are times when I wish that I was psychic. That I could see into the future and know what was coming — useful stuff like Lotto numbers and Super Bowl winners.

Oh, how I wish I would have had a premonition about 1 hour and 50 minutes before the closing credits of Sandra Bullock’s new thriller, “Premonition.”

A premonition that would have said, “This is going to be painfully bad, convoluted and confusing with a plot twist that Stevie Wonder could see coming from miles away and an ending so irritating that you’ll need a bath in calamine lotion.”

Maybe that would have been enough to convince me to get up and run out of the theater.

“Premonition” is the story of Bullock’s character Linda Hanson, who has a perfectly charming little life in a perfectly charming little house with her husband.

We know this because the film helpfully provides us with an oversaturated flashback shot.

Later, in the present, she adds two perfectly charming little daughters to the mix.

Everything is perfectly charming until a sheriff shows up at the house with the bad news that her husband has been killed in a car accident.

Rocking and reeling, she gets through the day, curling up to sleep, with a picture of her husband, but feeling like something isn’t quite right.

She wakes up the next morning and goes downstairs to find her husband drinking coffee and watching television.

Obviously, he’s not dead.

She eventually writes it off as a horrible dream, and goes on about her normal routine.

The audience begins to get the starting tingle that something is a little amiss — primarily courtesy of the soft focus background shots and the soundtrack almost ripped directly from M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Sixth Sense.”

There’s a dead bird — and some black bugs that look like they were digitally rendered by a bored high school student with attention-deficit disorder.

The next day she awakes to stumble downstairs and find that her husband is dead — again — and it’s time to go to the funeral.

What follows is probably one of the most unintentionally hilarious scenes in the history of motion pictures.

That Bullock actually agreed to even film it is either a testament to her courage or an indication that her judgement was somewhat impaired during the production.

The scene also leaves the impression that people who work in funeral homes don’t actually do any work — they just sort of pile the corpse into the coffin and jump on it until it squeezes shut.

Of course, you know what’s coming next — she wakes up the next morning, after her husband’s funeral — and tada, he’s alive again.

That’s when the audience and Linda Hanson both realize that she is living her life out of order.

The sad thing is, that by this point, only Linda really cares.

The audience is pulled through day after day as we ricochet back and forth between dead husband days and alive husband days.

All the while Hanson tries to put the puzzle pieces together in a race against time before her life goes back to its normal linear routine.

Why is this happening? Does it have anything to do with the dead bird? What about the digital bugs?

We don’t know.

The only explanation we get is a boring history lesson from a priest about people who claimed to see the future and a parable about how people who don’t believe in God are open to be taken over by forces beyond their control.

But what?

The devil? What horse does he have in the “He’s dead!” “Just kidding!” “No, he’s dead!” “Oops, he’s alive!” race?

Is the implication that the universe just inexplicably sometimes ruins the lives of random housewives for no reason by sticking them in a causal “dead husband” loop?

We don’t know — we just have the rambling of the priest who tells Linda that it’s never too late to fight for the things that really matter.

Fight what?

A schizophrenic day planner?

The film gets so convoluted and confusing that Hanson takes markers and creates a calendar to figure out when she is, what’s happened and what’s going to happen.

Which should have been the filmmaker’s first clue that things were getting a little too complex.

When your main character has to make a flowchart because they don’t know what’s going on, how can you expect the audience to muster the energy to follow along?

There’s five different storylines going on at once and the story has to bob and weave through them all.

Along the way there is betrayal, intrigue, mysteries and riddles — stuff that would be welcome if it weren’t packaged in a way that makes your head hurt.

The movie tries to sell one ending, but all the while the audience knows what’s coming.

It heads down the road with a certain inevitability — particularly since it appears in the trailer to the movie.

With the end there’s at least a sense of finality — a sense of relief that it’s finally over.

But the film, perhaps realizing that you have relaxed your guard after a cinematic beatdown of Ishtaresque proportions, saves one last useless kick that serves as a reminder that it hasn’t used every cliche in the book — until now.

Bullock doesn’t give a bad performance, she’s just saddled with a profoundly bad movie.

That being said, it’s hard to buy Bullock in a serious drama. She’s always going to be “the girl next door” or the poor man’s Julia Roberts with that little crooked grin.

Julian McMahon, who plays the on-again, off-again dead husband gets off light because — well, because half the movie he’s dead.

It was a film that probably seemed like a really good idea on paper — when you could put it on a flowchart — but it doesn’t work on the big screen.

I think, in hindsight, even Bullock would admit that.

Too bad she didn’t have a premonition about her career after this movie.

1 out of 5 pecans

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