quantum poker

I am genuinely amazed at the high scores for this movie. I love Joe Hill and have enjoyed the adaptations of Locke and Key and Nos4at2. Really enjoyed sinister. But this is a mess. Full of plot holes and inconsistencies. At one point, the window grille is pulled down, clattering to the floor. There’s no way to put it back, yet it’s never mentioned, or seen, again. The grabber has a fully formed mythology amongst the school kids, which suggests decades of build up, yet Fin knows all the kids as if they were in his year. The movie steals two major plot devices from silence of the lambs. I don’t mind the homage to Joes’s dad’s “IT”, but these two rankle badly. The grabber’s “mood expression”, changing masks make no sense either, seemingly able to react to developments in real time to show anger as if the outcome of an interaction was predetermined, even though Fin had a choice in how to respond to the set up questioning. Before being captured, Fin walk along a footpath while others appear and dissolve on Slomo, yet he’s only travelled about 200 feet in total when the van turns up. Both Fin and his sister having very weak and oblique psychic powers is just such a clear plot device to move things along at the appropriate time, and the drunken abusive father, apparently driven that way by their mothers own psychic powers freaking him out, is a King family cliche. And very poorly acted in this case. And in fact, very little happens when he is actually being held by the grabber, other than his weak psychic interactions making him take advantage of the ridiculously handy set of items strewn around that are helpful to his needs - including access to breaking through a wall and directly into the back of a freezer to feed a steak to a guard dog. Naturally, the front of the freezer is locked, like you do, so he can’t just climb through and escape. I wanted to like it, but couldn’t. Actually, the hype went on for months before release, and I guess that should have told me something. The only good thing I can say about it is that it wasn’t as bad as this year’s firestarter remake. So I gave it one more star than that.