Countdown is another of Hollywood's recent attempts to generate a quick win with a small investment, yet another soulless film and product of a system that wastes premises with potential in generic films.
The film follows Quinn Harris, a girl who decides to download an application that can predict how long until our imminent death. However, everything gets complicated when Quinn discovers that she has just over two days until her death prediction and strange things start happening around her. Reading a short description of these, we cannot help but be intrigued by what the film may offer, as we live in a world dependent on technology and applications that make life easier for us on a daily basis.
But instead of observing on screen a premise with explored potential to the fullest, we are forced to visualize a generic amalgamation of Jump Scares every minute, without any kind of tension, without any kind of terror.
The film is really more of the same, more than we have seen millions of times, without offering anything new, without even trying to be original (since, in its execution, it resembles the saga of films The Last Destination, only without the elaborate bloody deaths that made the 5 films so famous), containing only a relatively decent cinematography and direction.
It's really a shame to see ideas like the one that gave rise to this film being wasted, turned into scripts full of unexplored, basic mythologies and monotonous and trivial dialogues. The characters we are presented with are superficial, without any kind of distinct characteristics (although the actors do a good job with the material provided to them), the situations they find themselves in are familiar, many of the scenes in the film are unintentionally hilarious (which is not supposed to happen when you want to scare the audience) and the tone of the film oscillates as much (sometimes it tries to be completely terror, others a kind of amalgam of comedy and terror) as the waves of the peaceful.
All in all, this is a film that is not at all worthwhile, a product of a studio looking for easy money, without really wanting to present the audience with something worthy of their attention. This is the worst kind of horror film: the one without artistic integrity.
