The first half of this movie was great - the premise was great, and the diverse cast set it apart from other "afterlife" type films. However, moving into the second half, things got very muddled. It seems that the director didn't know exactly which direction to go in, so he went in all of them. It was very anti-climatic, and also relied on cheap jump- scares to drive the film. Quite disappointing as it had great potential.

The movies have depicted the hereafter in varied ways over the years. From the bleached white warehouses of Powell and Pressburger's "A Matter of Life and Death" in 1946 and Warren Beatty's "Heaven Can Wait" in 1978 to – for me – the peak of the game: Vincent Ward's mawkish but gorgeously rendered oil-paint version of heaven in 1998's "What Dreams May Come". Joel Schmacher's 1990's "Flatliners" saw a set of "brat pack" movie names of the day (including Kevin Bacon, Julia Roberts, William Baldwin and Kiefer Sutherland) as experimenting trainee doctors, cheating death to experience the afterlife and getting more than they bargained for. The depictions of the afterlife were unmemorable: in that I don't remember them much! (I think there was some sort of spooky tree involved, but that's about it!)

But the concept was sufficiently enticing – who isn't a little bit intrigued by the question of "what's beyond"? – that Cross Creek Pictures thought it worthy of dusting off and giving it another outing in pursuit of dirty lucre. But unfortunately this offering adds little to the property's reputation.

In this version, the lead role is headed up by Ellen Page ("Inception") who is a great actress… too good for this stuff. Also in that category is Diego Luna, who really made an impact in "Rogue One" but here has little to work with in terms of backstory. The remaining three doctors – Nina Dobrev as "the sexy one"; James Norton ("War and Peace") as "the posh boy" and Kiersey Clemons as the "cute but repressed one", all have even less backstory and struggle to make a great impact.

Also putting in an appearance, as the one link from the original film, is Kiefer Sutherland as a senior member of the teaching staff. But he's not playing the same character (that WOULD have been a bloody miracle!) and although Sutherland adds gravitas he really is given criminally little to do. What was director Niels Arden Oplev ("The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo") thinking?

In terms of the story, it's pretty much a re-hash of Peter Filardi's original, with Ben Ripley ("Source Code") adding a few minor tweaks to the screenplay to update it for the current generation. But I will levy the same criticism of this film as I levied at the recent Stephen King adaptation of "It": for horror to work well it need to obey some decent 'rules of physics' and although most of the scenes work (since a lot of the "action" is sensibly based inside the character's heads) there are the occasional linkages to the 'real world' that generate a "WTF???" response. A seemingly indestructible Mini car (which is also clearly untraceable by the police!) and a knife incident at the dockside are two cases in point.

Is there anything good to say about this film? Well, there are certainly a few tense moments that make the hairs on your neck at least start to stand to attention. But these are few and far between, amongst a sea of movie 'meh'. It's certainly not going to be the worst film I see this year, since at least I wasn't completely bored for the two hours. But I won't remember this one in a few weeks. As a summary in the form of a "Black Adder" quote, it's all a bit like a broken pencil….. pointless.

(For the graphical version of this review, please visit bob-the-movie- man.com. Thanks.)

Look, a lot of remakes or reboots or whatever you want to call them (Rebooquel sounds like something that might come from outer space so the less said the better), they are the same because they are based on the foundations of either good or great films - sometimes they can be something else that is interesting, but with the rare exceptions they don't improve on the originals. Flatliners had the potential, however, to be something more since the 1990 Joel Schumacher film was not very good, though it certainly had its ambitions and young stars who were game for a Frankenstein-cum-Elm-Street premise. The saddest thing is the remake does nothing visually to distinguish itself, and more infuriatingly does diddly squat at the script level to find new ideas for its premise.

Think about it: you can get someone to use some medical equipment to stop your heart, wait for a minute or two (or more!) while you are dead, and then can resurrect you so one can see what you went through while in that almost-all-gone phase of deadness. Is there a "light" at the end of the tunnel, or anything else? That's the meat that the 1990 Flatliners hung itself on, and while the script was mostly (surprisingly) under-cooked, in Schumacher there were no lack of off the wall visual ideas and the production design was off-balance, but it was certainly never boring. The 2017 Flatliners from the Swedish "Dragon Tattoo" director Oprev (and written by, of all people, the guy who scripted Source Code) is not interesting visually or striking in any way. This has the visual panache of tax attorney.

There is also some major mistaking going on at the casting level; at the least when you had that movie back in the 90's, you had that cast who had charisma to burn and could play off each other well (Oliver Platt had something to prove, man!) Here, with the exception of Ellen Page, no one is really bringing anything to the table and what the filmmakers have them do through the run time is either run-of-the-mill in terms of the story, or they kill off the *one* character that could keep us engaged with the material. Oh, and Keifer Sutherland shows up as discount House, MD, and what COULD be a connection to the original film - is this a sequel, may-hap - never materializes, making it simply an easy paycheck.

Why was this made if not a chance to explore some narrative or visual possibilities in the genre? Why not make it scary and push the R rating (this is PG-13) for audiences who are ready for a dark, suspenseful psychological thriller where young medical students who should know better have to grapple with the bad s*** they've done? This Flatliners isn't interested in that, either, and each character (Page included, and I don't count Diego Luna as he's the one who doesn't go for the flatlilining, and all we know about him is he's an ex-fireman, so who cares) has one note and only one trauma they have to re-experience in their half-hallucination-half-real state. The flaws from the original are not corrected, and the laziness amplifies it all. Not to mention at 110 minutes this feels punishingly long, and when the aforementioned character is out of the picture there's another half hour to go that feels like FIVE hours.

This is bland, stale, overheated garbage that made me literally BOO in my seat once it was done, not for anyone in particular in the theater, just because I could do it. It's one thing to get a remake that disappoints simply for existing (i.e. Ghostbusters last year), but it's another when you see what could have been in the hands of a twisted, hungry auteur out to show some shocking things - picture, for example, Tarsem circa The Cell, or Leos Carax or something - or a filmmaker who might want to just use the material for a straight drama and not go for the horror, which could also be done. Instead, Flatliners is stupid when it's not dull, and yet it's not stupid often enough to be an overall enjoyably bad movie (I did laugh here and there, but too little and too late). It's everything that is wrong with what SONY is currently doing in an overlong 110 minute package.