A young nurse downloads an app that tells her she only has three days to live. With time ticking away and a mysterious figure haunting her, she must find a way to save her life before time runs out.
So in a turn of events that I absolutely saw coming, “Countdown” ended up being complete dogshit. Outside of the dedicated performances and better than average production values, there isn’t a single thing that this film gets right.
The only thing I was counting down when it was all said and done was the mere amount of seconds I can muster seating in my seat with the eyes forcibly glued to and away from the screen before I’d ultimately make the decision to get up and walk out the theater because all elements of this movie are completely dull, boring, stock and/or infuriating. Characters are paper thin, dialogue is atrocious, the writing is asinine, the script is horrible, all comedic moments or attempts at comedy went dead on arrival, no tension or suspense is present since there are no scares, all of the subplots completely eat away at the pacing of the movie, it often dumbs down the plot elements and concepts it steals from other movies so the film isn’t even allowed to have fun with itself and it makes it abundantly clear that it doesn’t care about its characters, its premise or any sense of coherence, so there's no reason viewers should, either. It results in one of the most obvious horror movie ripoffs let alone one of the most embarrassing films I’ve seen all year.
This attempt at another high concept fate-driven horror flick doesn’t reach the same level of campiness, snarkiness, or even an unintentional sense of hilarity like Final Destination 3, the Happy Death Day series or even Truth Or Dare, to be frank about it; it’s just generic and manipulative from beginning to end. Nothing feels real, nothing makes sense, nothing flows together which I can, at least, applaud the previous films I’ve mentioned to try and justify their films level of ridiculousness. The cast tried their hardest here but there was nothing any of one them could do.
It just wants to make some fast money for Halloween, look really scary and then just disappear. Well, guess what? You did it: you made some fast money, tried to look scary and just disappeared, whoopty-freakin’-do, but only at the expense of cheating everyone in the audience out of another potentially interesting idea.
