DVD Review - Horsemen of the Apocalypse

Out for release on DVD and Blu-ray on Monday 19th October 2009 is "Horsemen of the Apocalypse" starring Dennis Quaid (G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, Pandorum) and Ziyi Zhang (House of Flying Daggers).

It has been likened to a few classic horror movies, Saw, Se7en, Hellraiser, and even the genius TV show, Dexter. Dennis Quaid plays Aidan Breslin, a detective currently grieving over the loss of his wife and trying to rebuild the relationship he appears to have lost with his two sons, Alex and Corey. He is normally pulled from pillar to post by his job and has very little time to spend with his sons, but even more so now that a serial killer, or four, are on the loose. It soon becomes apparent that the murderers are fashioning their kills in accordance with the biblical prophecies of the coming of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and it falls to Aidan to find out who the Horsemen are and who their next victims are going to be.

If John Doe didn't envy Detective David Mills' life, if Jigsaw had never played that first game with someone, if Dexter didn't have a dark passenger to satisfy, Horsemen might rank up there with the decent crime thrillers. Unfortunately, all of the above three, Se7en, Saw and Dexter do all exist and being name dropped as possible comparisons for Horsemen is probably the worst idea anyone ever had. Referencing these three means the first thing I did was think of them while watching Horsemen and constantly found elements that the above three all do better.

It's not a bad movie, it just isn't great. The backstory of Detective Breslin grieving over his wife is laid on ridiculously thick, yet with all of that being rammed down my throat, I just could not sympathise or relate. Quaid is not particularly convincing in his role and the movie was hardly a journey following the tracking of a killer. I don't actually recall Breslin solving anything until the end. The solutions to his problems seemed to just fall into his lap, he didn't really puzzle over the evidence in the case and didn't appear to arrive to conclusions himself, it all just seemed so easy and ran it's course naturally.

I still don't understand the purpose behind any of it. I couldn't possibly tell you why any of the deaths needed to occur in the eyes of the Horsemen and more importantly I couldn't tell you why the whole pattern of events had to have any relationship to the Four Horsemen. I may well have missed it during a speech by one of the characters, which is a possibility as I was still reeling from the annoying fact that I guessed the twist long before it happened. It just all seemed a bit pointless to me.

The movie also failed to "flow", which I found to be a huge problem. I would put this down to a lack of dialog. There were no real scenes of just dialog, leading to revelation. There was nothing in between scenes of Breslin finding a solution to a problem, or at the scene of another death. I find this difficult to explain but I would best describe this lack of flow as if the director had a sheet of paper with a list of plot points that needed to be covered, and he just filmed each plot point, ticked the relevant box on the sheet and moved on to the next one. Which is why the movie is pretty much filled with transitions like:

- Breslin receives a phone call informing him of a new murder.
- Cut to Breslin at murder scene.
- Cut to Breslin at morgue
- Cut to Breslin in police station summarising evidence
- Cut to interaction with kids
- Cut to Breslin receiving a phone call informing him of a new murder
and so on...

When compared with the dialog in Se7en, the length of the scenes of crime scene examination, the conversations between Pitt and Freeman, and the time attributed to telling the story, piece by piece, Horsemen falls way short of such quality. It almost felt like I'd missed the first half of the film and because of the poor transitions and lack of decent dialog, I felt like I was missing parts halfway through as well. It makes the movie difficult to even recollect.

Aside from the above, Horsemen did have a couple of noteworthy death and crime scenes, enough to rival Saw or similar, but unfortunately a couple of gory bits do not make a great movie, which is why I can only give it 2 Horseshoes out of 5. It really did try hard, but it just wasn't in the same league as the movies it likened itself to.