Spell

Directed by Mark Tonderai, Spell follows Omari Hardwick’s Marquis Woods as he crashes his plane in the Appalachian mountains and finds himself held prisoner by a voodoo practitioner (Loretta Devine’s Eloise) and her band of demented acolytes. Filmmaker Tonderai, working from Kurt Wimmer’s script, admittedly does an effective job of initially drawing the viewer into the deliberately-paced proceedings, as Spell kicks off with a familiar yet relatively promising opening stretch that benefits from Hardwick’s compelling performance and a sporadic willingness to flip one’s expectations. (There is, for example, a strong sequence wherein Marquis and his family are approached by a police officer that turns out, after a moment of palpable suspense, to be black.) It’s clear, then, that the picture’s downfall is triggered by a one-note midsection that could hardly be less interesting and more tedious, as virtually everything involving Devine’s wildly over-the-top figure suffers from a by-the-numbers, been-there-done-that feel that’s exacerbated by an aggressively underlit atmosphere and dank, unpleasant set design. There’s never a point, ultimately, at which Eloise’s mistreatment of Hardwick’s character makes a lick of sense and it is, as a result, impossible to work up any real sympathy for the protagonist’s plight, and although certain events within the third act pack a somewhat satisfying punch, Spell has long-since confirmed its place as a frustrating misfire that’s riddled with underwhelming, uninvolving elements.

* out of ****