Sometimes a movie has one good idea, but the filmmaker never realizes it. Countdown is such a movie. I am not recommending that you see it. The movie introduces the premise that if you download an app, it will tell you when you are going to die, and there is no way to avoid your expiration date. The premise is not the good idea. A lot of the supporting actors may be recognizable if you watch a lot of CW DC Comics series. The dad is the Reverse Flash. The protagonist’s potential love interest is Khalil/Painkiller from Black Lightning. He is called Matt, but I just kept thinking of him as Khalil. The racist, but surprisingly protective principal from Black Lightning plays a priest. A doctor played a villain in the first season of Supergirl. I don’t recognize the protagonist, but apparently I should remember her from Once Upon A Time. The oldest kid from The Middle is allegedly playing an adult.
Countdown is a messy mashup of a lot of elements from better movies. It has the misdirected hint to the audience regarding who the protagonist is from the beginning of Scream. The characters face the same premise as Final Destination. It has the disturbing cell noise from Happy Death Day.
Countdown’s main problem is establishing a cohesive tone and rhythm in the way that it introduces characters and establishes their personality and situation. The introduction montage of the main character makes her life seem fine, which we later objectively find out it absolutely is not even without the nightmare app so when we discover this development, it feels abrupt instead of teased earlier. Too late in the film, it suddenly introduces a few supporting characters that then become the central focus of the film only to completely disappear later in the film. Earlier forgettable characters suddenly play a pivotal role, and the protagonist and viewers are supposed to be invested in this character, but we are not because we learn nothing about this person that would endear us to her other than her relationship to the protagonist. There are some sociopolitical elements introduced earlier in the film that seem introduced to flesh out the characters’ work routine, but play a pivotal role in the denouement then one of the two is dropped like a hot potato.
Do I think that Countdown’s filmmaker has good intentions? Absolutely. You could probably take this person to brunch. I detected a true desire for diversity in the casting choices. His heart is in the right place when it comes to the war on drugs and sexual harassment, but there is just something that is ultimately off in the delivery that suggests a person who knows the right answer, but is unable to show the work leading up to getting to that answer. Something is off in understanding sibling and romantic dynamics, how a work bureaucracy functions, the psychological profile of how healthy characters act.
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When the doctor and the protagonist are introduced initially, they seem friendly and even potentially as if they are interested in each other. Side note: why does that hospital only have one doctor? Doctors are not involved in the bureaucracy of whether or not a nurse gets a job or not. The movie lost me with these details. Then the camera work shows him invading her space and getting too handsy, but it almost feels as if it is related to the supernatural element of the film exacerbating his latent creepy proclivities until it leads to an outburst. Then on her day off, a board is already assembled to turn the tables and accuse her of sexual harassment. Nothing is this quick. When she discovers that he has done this before (duh), she realizes that in order to cheat the app, she could kill him. Wait, WHUT?!?
I love the idea that someone who has up to this point has only been caring, a nervous Nellie, avoids conflict and uncomfortable moments like the plague and felt drawn to a profession to save lives suddenly would flip and jump to murder as an acceptable option although it absolutely does not fit with the protagonist’s character profile. It is such a leap in logic that it could only be explained by this person always being completely psychotic and just needed the right catalyst to bring it out. It is the equivalent of suddenly becoming aware that you are in the zombie apocalypse and jumping from normal civilian to Shane in two seconds. Then something was always a little off in you, but you were just effectively able to hide it.
Countdown could have been a great movie if it had mashed up the Final Destination premise with a Battle Royale solution, but then the protagonist’s personality would need to be adjusted to make it fit. She would still have to seem like the same person, but with flashes of her true antisocial personality coming through, which would be a great, cold way to address her family issues—sociopathic neglect as an acceptable female normative way to cause harm. Honestly the movie is at its best during the physical confrontation between the nurse, who is definitely trying to commit murder even if we do not really care if the victim lives or dies, and a doctor who is rapey, but rapey does not mean that he was ready to defend himself with lethal force. A rapey person is not necessarily a murderer although that person does enjoy inflicting physical harm. She decided to become a vigilante so quickly it was ridiculous. So regarding intent, it is an uneven playing field, but regarding physical advantage, it is the reverse. Most people are unable to kill even when they want to. There is actually a field of study called killology, which suggests that soldiers will subconsciously miss targets in battle. The moment when she throws the crowbar and hits him is the best moment in the film, especially since he really has no idea how to handle the situation. Unfortunately the movie ends happily, but um, the doctor would sustain injuries and call the police so huh? I hate dangling threads.
Also as someone who was raised Christian fundamentalist, the movie completely lost me when the priest said, “nineteen out of twenty-seven books of the Bible.” Don’t you mean the books of the New Testament? In the Bible, there are sixty-six books, seventy-three if you are Catholic. When the priest starts to tell Ozhin’s story as if it was a Bible story, I was so annoyed. No, it is not! A demon does not have to be in the Bible for the story to work—talk to Ari Aster, please, but by explicitly referencing the Bible, it completely took me out of the story. This movie needed Supernatural’s Winchesters. Ozhin utterly failed at evoking any real terror. All these dumb asses had to do was stay in the circle or oval of salt and stop trying to talk to your dead relatives. Damn! Also while I appreciate the enthusiasm of characterizing the Bible as a graphic novel, you do realize that it originally never came with illustrations, right? Ugh.