The Covenant (2006/Blu-ray)
Picture: B Sound: B Extras: C- Film: D
Running
out of steam with action films, watching his big-budget race car film Driven getting mowed over by the less
expensive The Fast & The Furious,
watching that expand into a profitable (if silly) franchise and then shooting a
second Exorcist prequel after Morgan
Creek scrapped a Paul Schrader/John Frankenheimer attempt that was worse than
what the studio had in the can in the first place, you would think Hollywood
would understand that director Renny Harlin was out of gas.
Unfortunately,
that was not the case, so what does Harlin follow-up his supernatural disaster
of a film with? Another supernatural film that is even worse! The Covenant is so bad, formulaic, predictable,
silly, pointless, lacing in any suspense or suspension of disbelief, that you
sit stunned at how bad it really is. The
cast of unknown actors and actresses all look and act the same, made worse by
semi-nude scenes. The idea that they
inherited powers from 17th Century witches & warlocks and go on
a rampage never explains how these powers skipped a few generations of
relatives who might have had these powers.
A missing member turns up and starts a war to boot, leaving the viewer
to hope for massive collateral damage so this very, very long 97 minutes will
end quickly.
The
screenplay by J.S. Cardone is shockingly inept and pedestrian, Harlin does
nothing any other hack could have done more cheaply and it looks like a Satanic X-Men wannabe in marketing and
special effects. Even the actor’s bad
haircuts suggest that. The attempts to
be hip are forced beyond belief and I guess the hope was for a franchise. Sony can do better than this.
The 1080p
2.35 x 1 digital High Definition image is often digitally plastered Super 35mm
film with the usual gutted color and monotones, as shot by cinematographer
Pierre Gill. Though it is clear and
sharp enough to distinguish it from a standard DVD, this is no demo quality
image by any means. The PCM 5.1
16Bit/48kHz sound mix is also nothing special, though better than the Dolby
Digital 5.1, with improvements in thickness and dialogue. Otherwise, the music (by tomanddandy, who did
such a good job on the far superior Hills
Have Eyes remake, reviewed elsewhere on this site) is not great, but then
there is nothing here to really score.
The combination is unexciting and surprisingly lame.
Extras
include a featurette called Breaking The
Silence (like we’d mistake the quality of this film for something like Silence Of The Lambs) and audio
commentary by Harlin that is amusing to say the least, but least is the
operative word for this mess. Skip it so
Harlin will wise up or retire.
- Nicholas Sheffo
