Hilary Swank stars as Katherine Winter, a college professor who
spends her days hunting down and disproving supposed religious miracles. A
former ordained minister who lost her husband and daughter in Africa, she now
discovers rational scientific answers to such cases as the sick and terminally
ill being healed by touching the body of a dead monk in South America. While
back home teaching at the college where she works, Katherine gets a visit from
Doug Blackwell (David Morrissey) a science teacher in a small rural town in Louisiana known as Haven.
It appears that the waters surrounding this bayou-based town have all turned red,
imitating one of the plagues from the bible. Doug wants Katherine to come and
investigate.
Nobody believes it’s the end of the world, but people in town are blaming the
crimson waters on a local twelve year old girl named Loren McConnell (young AnnaSophia Robb, who's very good), who lives on
the outskirts with her mother and brother. Loren and her family had always been
outcasts, believed to be Satanists, but the girl became a pariah with the
religious townsfolk when she discovered her brother’s body on the edge of the
bayou. The boy’s death was mysterious, as is the growing recurrence of biblical
plagues that keep haunting Haven. And the normally sensible Katherine is at a
lost to find a rational explanation for it all.
The Reaping starts out with a great deal of promise, and Hilary Swank is such a
good actress that she simply can’t give a bad performance, but this film soon
devolves into another Omen clone, and it’s about as scary, too. Despite the fact
that it’s well-acted, The Reaping is filled with the sort of cheap false scares
that are very annoying--the type of shocking moment when a threatening shadow
turns out to be a cat, or the horrific scene a character encounters was just a
dream--because the movie never feels like it’s getting anywhere. The pacing is
nonexistent, and the ending is all-too predictable. However, the filmmakers
deserved kudos for making the decision to continue working in the
Katrina-devastated areas of Louisiana after the hurricane struck during filming.
It’s too bad the film that resulted just wasn’t as good as the noble intentions
of its makers.
--SF
