13 Minutes

Directed by Lindsay Gossling, 13 Minutes follows several disparate characters, including Amy Smart’s Kim, Trace Adkins’ Rick, and Anne Heche’s Tammy, as they’re forced to spring into action after a deadly tornado makes landfall in their small town. It’s a reasonable-enough setup that’s employed to predominantly tedious and flat-out unwatchable effect by Gossling, as the first-time filmmaker, working from her own screenplay, delivers a sluggish drama that’s been suffused with a whole host of inept, uninvolving elements and subplots – with the continuing emphasis on obvious and hopelessly less-than-subtle narrative threads compounded by the picture’s assortment of one-dimensional, far-from-sympathetic characters. Gossling’s didactic approach to her paint-by-numbers screenplay paves the way for a series of eye-rollingly obvious encounters and revelations, including a laughable digression wherein a gay character finally receives acceptance from his parents in the wake of said tornado, and it’s clear, as well, that 13 Minutes‘ arms-length atmosphere is perpetuated by its often shockingly low-rent, distractingly uncinematic sensibilities (ie a garden-variety episode of Blue Bloods is more impressively visually than this flat mess). There’s little doubt, as a result, that the climactic weather event is unable to pack even a fraction of the visceral thrills Gossling has surely intended, which does, in the end, cement 13 Minutes‘ place as a frustratingly misbegotten and ill-conceived piece of work that contains few, if any, positive attributes.

1/2* out of ****