There's a VHS tape. Labelled with a scrawl that reads, ‘watch me’. And for the sake of its The Ring franchise, Hollywood has been making sure naive white people on screen havebeen dutifully carrying out that task, and in the process, as a Blues songsays, going where they shouldn't go, being who they shouldn't be and doing whatthey shouldn't do.
It was alright whenthe first of its kind was milked from Japan but the latest spawn from KojiSuzuki’s novel, Rings , offers nearly no reason to even miss aheartbeat.
There's a youngcouple, Holt (a perennially clueless and useless Alex Roe) and Julia (aslightly more clued in Matilda Lutz). There’s a badass professor, Gabriel(Johnny Galecki, at last, taking a break from experimental physics to focus onbiology … and, of course, the supernatural). Holt, on account of being aclueless student, is sucked into Gabriel’s experiments with the human soul.Julia, predictably, pulls herself in too. We really do not know what shespecialises in, but going by the movie, I would endorse her on LinkedIn foreffective communication with the dead, creative visualisation andreconstruction, quick interpretation of pagan/christian symbols (please take abackseat, Prof. Robert Langdon) and giving the slip to creepy, blind men. Andpassable expressions of being horrified.
Rings , otherwise, fails to exude any semblance of a claustrophobicatmosphere or indeed, of a convincing horror movie. Matthew Margeson’s score,instead of heightening our senses and bringing us to the edge of our seats,seems to have buried itself underneath the mediocre screenplay that hardlyscratches the surface of our fears.
Nevertheless, thecharacters relentlessly pursue the unknown based on clues from Julia’s visions.The audience meanwhile are left searching for an element of surprise.
In Rings ,there’s a recurring pattern with the number seven: days left for a victim tolive after watching the video, the time of day when the spirit comes alive andin all fairness, the number of days this film should be allowed to run intheatres.
