Atheist Katherine Winter do a great job proving miracles wrong with scientific facts but when she's called to the small town of Haven where a river has turned blood red it only the beginning of ten biblical plagues to come.
Let me start this review off by saying that my expectations for THE REAPING were kinda low from the beginning, I'm not a fan of Hilary Swank and was somewhat convinced that this would be yet another commercial semi-horror flick a la Hollywood with way too much CGI in it. Well, I was both wrong and right I guess. While the film may be commercial and feature a helluva lot of CGI it was not as bad (or boring) as it first seemed to be, and when it comes to Swank her performance was definitely solid so no complaints there. But I guess what I was most afraid of was that the film were gonna contain too much religious nonsense and angle everything from a very christian point of view, but luckily the viewer is pretty much spared some that as well, even though it deals with biblical happenings. A cool thing though is that we got all these scientific explanations to the ten plagues and what else which worked as "fun facts" and pretty cool to hear about. Anyway, atheists really have nothing to worry about here because while the film may be religion-oriented, it's not what makes it tick.
 
The predictable plot goes something like this: Swank plays Katherine Winter, an atheist woman who lost her fate in God long ago (there's a backstory to that of course) and now has a scientific explanation for every miracle. Basically she sent to a small town called Haven where a river has turned blood red which the people in town believes is the first of ten plagues to come. While investigating, dead frogs starts falling from the sky (well from trees) and when sending the red water to a lab she later gets the test result back stating that the red water is really human blood. The plagues continue to hit, one by one, and the residents in town blame a young girl for causing it all, but could a little girl really be the cause of what's happening?
THE REAPING kinda reminded me in a way about SILENT HILL but even more of THE OMEN but in small ways only so don't draw any big conclusions. Also, it was much more enjoyable than what I first had thought it would be; it had very good pacing, it was stylish and very easy to follow and the CGI that I had feared for actually fit into the film in a very good way. Biggest problems with the film to was that it was too easy to figure out and you could see the little twist in the end coming from miles away and knew pretty much exactly what to expect which brought everything down a notch or two. But I gotta say that up until the end I found THE REAPING to be enjoyable enough.
Despite all the bad reviews on the net, if I were you I'd give it a shot, don't expect miracles but I'm quite sure you'll be entertained. The ending could've been better but at least the film works as a whole. The also could've focused on giving some of the cool plagues more time and build-up instead of rushing through ten plagues in 90 minutes, but what the heck, it's not the end of the world.
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ALTERNATIVE TITLE:
MOVIE YEAR: 2007
DIRECTOR: Stephen Hopkins
WRITING CREDITS: Carey Hayes, Chad Hayes
GENRE: Horror, Thriller
CAST: Hilary Swank, David Morrissey, AnnaSophia Robb
COUNTRY: USA
RUNTIME: 99 min
RATING: 6/10
Reaping, The Website/IMDB Click here
Reaping, The Trailer Click here
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