The Reaping

Directed by Stephen Hopkins, The Reaping follows Hilary Swank’s Katherine Winter as she and her assistant (Idris Elba’s Ben) arrive in a small Louisiana town to investigate a series of possibly biblical happenings. It’s a relatively decent premise that’s employed to progressively unwatchable effect by Hopkins, as the filmmaker, working from Carey and Chad Hayes’ screenplay, delivers an unreasonably deliberate narrative that’s been jam-packed with tedious expository sequences and long, drawn-out instances of characters exploring creepy environs. And though Hopkins has managed to elicit decent performances from his various actors, The Reaping, for the most part, comes off as an interminable slog that culminates in an absolutely disastrous, headache-inducing special-effects-heavy third act – with the end result a fairly calamitous trainwreck that presumably bears little resemblance to Hopkins’ original vision (ie one has to imagine this is not what he initially set out to produce).

* out of ****

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