Director: Kevin Kölsch, Dennis Widmyer
Cast: Jason Clarke (sigh), Amy Seimetz, John Lithgow, Jeté Laurence
Have I Seen it Before: Oddly enough, no… Although it feels like the sight of Jason Clarke taking a walk in the middle of the night has bored me forever.
Did I Like It: That feels like a ridiculous question. No. No, I didn’t
Let’s talk for a moment about Jason Clarke. I’m sure he’s a perfectly fine person, but I can’t—after many attempts to make sense out of it—figure out how this man has become a regularly working film star. Between this, Winchester (2018), and Terminator: Genisys* (2015) he’s well on his way to becoming the Ted McGinley of tired franchise movies.
And for once, I don’t think it’s entirely, or even mostly Clarke’s fault that the movie surrounding him is a slowly simmering garbage fire. This film drags through it’s interminable (and yet somehow less than 2 hour) runtime as a mishmash of plot elements set up that go nowhere. The masked cult surrounding the Pet Sematary is introduced in the first few minutes, and hardly referred to again in the film. Pascow (Obssa Ahmed) loses his head** and then promptly has no role for the rest of the film. And even poor Gage (Hugo and Lucas Lavoie), the previous anchor of everything you would expect to come from the story of Pet Sematary has nothing to do other than act as a misdirection for the one profound change from the source material.
And that misdirection does pique peak interest from me during the screening, but unfortunately what appears to be the only rationale for the film to exist in the first place accounts for a minute, and there’s still a lot of movie to sit through at that point. In a fit of fancy I got a large drink and popcorn, so it still managed to be a pleasant way to spend an aftrnoon.
* Which I originally typed with the most ridiculous spelling I could imagine, only to find that the “correct” spelling was even more preposterous.
** It’s deeply distressing how proud I am of this sentence.