How do you know that you’re on the wrong path? It is very easy. Who do you choose: Idris Elba or David Morrissey? Elba. OK, but what if Elba was a former student and current work colleague? Emphasis on the former, Elba. The answer is always Elba. What if Elba isn’t interested in you? You still don’t choose Morrissey because have you seen The Walking Dead? To be fair, The Reaping was in theaters before The Walking Dead was even in production, and the Governor was a lame villain on everyone’s TV screens, but while I’m sure that the real life man is lovely and probably worthy to watch my cats, you never trust him. (No, he is not. Most of my friends and family would not make the cut to watch my cats, but I would trust Gabrielle Union because I read her book, and have you seen the preview for Breaking In?) I knew that his character was evil for one reason. His grill turned on him, and a grill does not turn on a good man. Also if my food turned into creepy crawlies, I’m not bringing that crap inside my house to throw out. It is going in a garbage can outside of my home that is also going to be thrown out and never used again.
I love bad movies, but The Reaping is dreckitude. On a good day, its goal should be to be bad. It is really not worth your time. The Reaping thinks that it is being clever when it is fairly obvious early in the movie that they are going to pull a switcheroo on whom the villain is or more importantly whom the villain isn’t. If you watched it, and you couldn’t tell, you probably voted for Presidon’t, and I’m sorry, but you actually need Jesus, not Viking Jesus and can’t be trusted to make decisions without supervision.
The Reaping shows Hillary Swank’s character (let’s call her Andrea) gradually believing in the supernatural, that a little girl is the cause of the plagues and needs to die because Andrea is an idiot who apparently does not read Arthur Miller instead of the obvious answer that everyone in the town is cray cray, not really Christians, wear red baseball caps with KKK origin slogans on them and are a little too eager to kill little girls! I thought that we had agreed a long time ago that we don’t kill kids, but apparently that is still a lesson that we have to keep teaching. They don’t even try to hide their insanity from jump. Even Elba, her work colleague, shudders and hides his cross under his shirt. I know that he and Andrea aren’t close, because he never turns to her and says, “You know these people are going to lynch me, right?” If the one believer that you have known forever is shrinking away from everyone in fear and thinks that his cross makes him a target, these people aren’t Christians! Also Americans who think that their little corner of the state is a suitable parallel to the Chosen People, they think way too highly of themselves. Where do you score on national literacy? Math?
I am sick of movies with a woman debunker whom every viewer knows is going to become a believer in the supernatural fairly early in the movie because she has the hots for a guy. Sadly The Reaping nailed this phenomenon because I can’t tell you how many of my friends were vegetarians who became meat eaters the minute that they met the right guy. May I interest you in The Awakening? It is a thing. Amazingly the movie does not crap on science and uses science to give clues that she completely misses: the river actually does have blood in it. So how does blood get in a river? Dead bodies, and a lot of them since the whole river is red. Even if you think the kid killed her older brother despite finding a weird sacrificial chamber in her mom’s basement, you think that kid was able to kill enough people to make the Bayou red?
In this movie’s case, Andrea no longer believes in God because somehow her husband and child, not her, got killed as missionaries as a sacrifice to some pagan god because there was a famine in the Sudan. I know that Christian missionaries tragically get killed for their beliefs, but that particular reason sounds hella racist and sloppy. Kill her too. Also she was an ordained minister in what denomination? Sadly that isn’t so easy for women to do in the real world, but then becoming best buddies with a Catholic priest seems extra. Also why didn’t they also sacrifice the priest? Did the sacrifice come with special instructions: no well known stars like Swank or Stephen Rea can be sacrificed, just unknowns. This god sounds choosy, but perhaps would have made a better movie. Does this storyline make you retroactively angrier at Andrea for even considering killing a little blonde girl like her daughter to save a town? It should.
Because The Reaping is trash, I knew that the movie was silently judging her and telling the viewers not to trust her judgment, which duh. Fundamentalist Christians believe that women can’t be ministers, and she was acting as if she was the head of the household by deciding where the family should go so while the movie isn’t cosigning sacrificing missionaries, it is quiet critique. Please note that this movie has a more fundamentalist mean streak than most Christian made movies, but the average viewer would not notice it. I was brought up fundamentalist, and even my still fundamentalist mom drilled that crap out of me by pointing to all the awesome Old Testament prophets and judges who were women. Huldah! Read your Bible!
Apparently Andrea didn’t because she forgot the simple point that the plagues occurred when the Egyptians were bad! So even if she began to believe that the plagues were supernatural, I still don’t get how she thought the devil caused it, and somehow the townspeople did not deserve that mess. Here the blame rests on the priest who says some malarkey that did not make sense. Andrea was an angel, the girl is like the antichrist created by a cult, and the angel has to kill the antichrist. Wait, angels aren’t angels anymore, but supernatural crap is happening. How did you get here? Angel means servant of God. Nobody’s supposed to be here! Also if the priest was getting legit warnings from God like Moses in the form of fire, the fire isn’t supposed to burn, and he dies! God doesn’t kill His messengers for doing a good job! Andrea is an awful friend and basically assumes that his screams of terror are bad reception.
It turns out that the kid actually did cause the plagues, but is using them as self-defense against the people trying to kill her, which I have to concede was actually pretty cool. The kid is a little annoying because she rarely talks, just communicates in visions. So the kid is the angel. Can we just not call her that because it is stupid. Do you know what would have made it a better movie, i.e. a fun bad movie? The Reaping needed to be made by a Christian movie film production company! Say what you will, but they make a clear movie and hit all the right notes in their Biblical apocalyptic supernatural movies. The whole movie should have played it straight with the kid clearly on God’s side and trying to get Andrea to accept Jesus into her heart as her Lord and Savior because I did enjoy God going all Raiders of the Lost Ark on the town at the end. That would have been a good bad movie!
The Reaping has oneiric moments that make it unclear if something is actually happening, the kid induced a vision, or Andrea is dreaming. There is a point when it appears that Andrea and the Governor are sleeping together, but I was not sure because they just met and Idris Elba. Plot twist: the kid announces that Andrea is pregnant with the antichrist, and Andrea needs to take care of that crap. Then we get an unwelcome flashback of the Governor’s evil thrusts with the retroactively clear intention to make the priest’s warning come true, but the priest had it all turned around. Dun dun dun. For real, Andrea, you didn’t use a condom! Ugh, no wonder you ditched science at the earliest opportunity. Clearly The Reaping thought this would make a great franchise or tv series, which no one needs or requested. Thankfully the universe spared us that grisly fate and gave us The Exorcist TV series instead, which I really have to get caught up on the second season because I enjoyed the first more than I expected.
Please watch The Exorcist season 1 instead of The Reaping. My review may have made the movie sound like a fun hate watch, but it really wasn’t.