Horsemen Review

Disclaimer: Contains spoilers!

Plot Summary: A detective finds himself on the trail of killers who believe themselves to be the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Review: Wow, what a promising premise ruined so profoundly through a pretentious story loaded with endless stupidity. This could have been something really awesome, but instead comes off as a pathetic "Seven" wannabe. I mean, come on, it's the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse for god's sake (hah puns)! How can you screw up such an intriguing concept when it practically writes itself? The main problem with the film is that it feels disjointed as if there are many gaps, deleted scenes, or some kind of problems between the scenes interrupting the story's flow. There are discrepancies with the running time so there very well may be an uncut version somewhere out there in limbo or the film could have been unfinished and was rushed to completion with scenes missing. The story focuses on Aidan Breslin, played adequately by Dennis Quaid, a detective that focuses on dental forensics who is first called to a scene in which an entire set of bloody teeth are arranged on a tray, in the middle of a frozen lake, with the words "Come and See" written on four trees. Later, Aidan is called to a murder scene of a woman with the same phrase written at the crime scene, and the woman is strung up an in elaborate device that is seemingly custom built. There appears to be impressions on the carpet revealing that there were four killers present, the wounds on the woman were meant to kill her slowly with surgical accuracy, and that she had been pregnant with the fetus being removed. Honestly, this kill is the only decent thing going on in this film so they were wise to place it at the beginning in an attempt to lull the audience into a false sense that they might actually be watching a good film. The moment you see the dead woman's adopted daughter, Kristin, played excellently by Ziyi Zhang, it is unbelievably obvious she is one of the killers. Thankfully, this fact was understood and Kristin confesses fairly early on seemingly because she felt bad for killing the fetus unintentionally and because she wants to antagonize Aidan. Honestly, the highlight of this movie is whenever these two talk since Ms. Zhang is able to pull off the crazy angle quite well. I've read others complain about Ms. Zhang's English, but I thought she sounded fine. I also felt she was kind of sexy for a killer...I've really got to stop loving all these bad girls! She is somewhat sympathetic since she had been molested her whole life by her dad while the mom was presumably idle and so she decided to kill the mom and set the dad up to go to jail and live with his suffering; that's my explanation of what happened since the film is annoyingly unclear on the details. Before this, there had been another murder, but it didn't use the same hanging device but it did have the "Come and See" line written only three times though. As you may gather, most of the bull shit in this movie comes off as obvious plotlines that you know will be investigated later so it removes a lot of the mystery along the way. To cut to the chase, this second murder victim was actually one of the horsemen and since the other horsemen were angry he wasn't emo enough for them they killed him. The next victim is another horseman who was mad his brother couldn't accept he was gay, so he kills himself in front of the brother that he has strung up on one of the hanging devices. In typical emo-loser fashion, he figured this would be the best way to hurt his brother. Silly emos, get a grip and learn to cope with reality! Aidan finally realizes maybe someone wanted him on this case all along since it all began with those little toofies! Oh, you think?! Now, this whole movie, we are given embarrassingly obvious hints that Aidan's son, Alex, is the leader of the horsemen. Alex has been super emo since his mom, Aidan's wife, died and basically all he wanted was to make Aidan...uh, I guess, sad? We don't really get a legitimate reason as to what the goal was because Alex plans to kill himself in front of his weird internet followers. This is another aspect that feels left out big time. We only get a slight mention of the website that you learn Alex has created to unite emo bitches. At the same time the horsemen were somehow gathered through some therapy session that is glossed over. Essentially, the most important part of the film, the very reason why everything is happening, is the least explored part of the story! Oh, and Alex is in the final hanging device even though there seems to be no conceivable way he got himself into it without help. In the end, Aidan tries to console the whining little bitch boy as we cut to Aidan at his home reassuring his other son that everything is fine and that's just how it ends. We have no idea what became of Alex, what the hell was the point of all this, and how the fuck did they think this was going to end the world?! Maybe there was supposed to be more with the internet site like other emo bitch boys would kill themselves after Alex, but there is no mention of this. Grr, I don't know what the hell happened here because under all the contrivances, obvious twists, plot holes, pretentious preaching, stupid choices, and shenanigans, there was a decent story that went completely wasted. I wanted to like this film, but I knew they were on the wrong track when they didn't make Death the leader of the horsemen. Hello mother fuckers, "And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat upon him was Death, and Hell followed with him!" What's more badass than that?! And only Death is ever named as a horseman, the rest are just ambiguous. There are good ideas in this movie for sure, you are engaged even if you can predict everything that will happen, and the acting is decent for the most part. Maybe I was expecting it to be more on "Seven's" level if it's going to copy its approach. It's just barely worth a view, but you have to understand ahead of time what you're getting yourself into or you will be sorely disappointed as I was.

Notable Moment: Any of the times when Aidan is interviewing Kristin. The banter between the two is the best part of the movie and even this didn't come to a satisfying conclusion.

Final Rating: 5/10