The first story is about Marie (Cecile de France, High Tension), the host of a current affairs program on French television, who momentarily dies when she's caught in a tsunami while on vacation in Southeast Asia. While dead, she sees shadowy figures standing in a white space, and spends the rest of the movie wondering what happened to her, even though the minute it happens anyone who's ever seen a movie or read a book can see that she was in the afterlife. But we still have to sit and endure as she drifts through a French melodrama in which she loses her job, her producer/lover and a book deal. Which is tangentially related to what happened to her, but not really.

Matt Damon plays George, a former psychic (really, a medium) who has retired from the life because seeing those shadowy figures in that white space is... really upsetting? I kept waiting for him to reveal a personal toll it took on him, but all we know for sure is that he doesn't like doing it. Not that his brother Jay Mohr cares, because he keeps bringing him clients, and hasn't even taken down the Website advertising his brother's services. Otherwise, George seems to have shut himself off from the world, because relationships where he can touch people always seem to end in disaster, but when he opens himself up to a girl he meets in a cooking class, she immediately pressures him into doing a reading, and it... ends in disaster. Which he already told us. So most of his storyline is a complete waste of time.

In London, two twin brothers take care of their drunk-druggie mother, until one is hit by a car, and the mother is sent to rehab, leaving young Marcus with foster parents, where he steals money to try to find someone who can put him in contact with his dead brother. This probably could have been the best part of the movie, except for one thing: Hiring real identical twins, who have clearly never acted in their lives, to play Jason and Marcus, was a huge mistake. Marcus is the protagonist of one-third of the movie, and he delivers his lines like he's reciting a book report in front of a classroom full of kids who've told him they're going to beat him up at recess. Considering how little screentime the twins share together before Jason gets killed, some of that tidal wave budget could have gone into doing a little split-screen work with a non-twin actor.

My biggest complaint is that everything we see is incredibly familiar. George's "I died on the operating table" origin story, Marie's near-death-experience, the crazy charlatans who claim to be able to talk to the dead... they've all been done so many times before that they're practically clichés. Ostensibly, this movie is about how these various things would be viewed in the real world, but aside from a few ripped-from-the-headlines tie-ins (the tsunami, London subway bombings), it's not like the world they take place in is particularly realistic. The protagonists' stories are all melodramatic in their own ways, with very convenient story elements coming in to play to drive them in the directions they need to go. And the wrap-up at the end is so sugary-sweet, with a love story that comes literally out of nowhere, and doesn't even make any sense, really, that it puts the final nail in the coffin containing whatever realism the film was going for.

Did you see the film? Let us know what you thought of it below, then read our reviews of Conviction and RED.

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