Avoid If Possible.

Rating: 2/10 (26 December 2011)

It begins with a horrifying and bloody nightmare from which Vera Farmiga awakes shaken. We don't know it's a nightmare until there is a cut to her sitting up, panting and sweaty. How's that for an imaginative scene?
It ends with one of those excruciating scenes in which a slasher -- in this case the adopted and demonic daughter of Farmiga and husband Pete Sarsgaard chases everyone around the darkened house with a bloody knife, murdering her way through the gloom. Every movement of the knife seems to be accompanied by the snick of sharp metal against metal -- even when the knife is only being waved through the air. Even when it's brandished UNDER WATER.
Good-bye Sarsgaard, overcome by a pubescent young girl. And it's almost good-bye for Farmiga and her younger daughter as they are chased through the snowy woods by the knife-wielding juvenile maniac.
The adopted kid is one of those slashers who are very difficult to kill, a veritable Rasputin. You can stomp her, you can kick her face in, you can shoot her. She falls down, apparently lifeless, but just as the sweet music begins to play, she comes back to life more animated, more thoroughly evil, than before. You can pull her underwater too. Doesn't matter. Nothing matters.
In her last scene, the adopted demon drowns the way it has become fashionable to drown -- the way Robin Williams drowns in "Insomnia," and George Clooney in "The Perfect Storm", and Leonard DeCaprio in "Titanic." Each drifts slowly down into the murk, looking upward, sometimes smiling. There is no longer any other way to die underwater. A struggle would be unseemly.
You want a laugh? Johnson and Mace, the "writers", whose names I believe are actually the nom de plume of some deranged computer, have Farmiga in a hospital bed. She receives a call on her cell phone, informing her that the adopted nine-year-old daughter is really a thirty-three year old homicidal maniac and that her husband and child are in immediate danger. What would you, the viewer, do? You'd rush to the nurse's station, have the caller repeat the information, and dial the police pronto. Not this heroine. As always happens in these movies, she tells no one, stumbles out to her car, and speeds over the snow, ice-slick roads to her distant home -- alone.
This is derivative garbage, mostly from "The Omen" but borrowing from any source that promises the additional thrill that will suck another unwary customer into the theater. It's only ambition is to deliver money-making thrills. If you're into arousal jags, this one should do the job.
The pity is that both Vera Farmiga and Peter Sarsgaard are fine actors of considerable talent and range. Farmiga, in particular, has the kind of quirky face and sexy figure that seems made for the camera. Her features are plastic, as if some sculptor had begin molding a beautiful visage and then was called away before he was quite finished. And Sarsgaard can play good or bad. He has the kind of bland cleanliness that can go either way. But seeing him lying on his back on the floor, with that maniacal kid sitting on his chest, stabbing him repeatedly while he watches curiously -- well, it was all too much.
How can anyone attach his or her name to an abomination like this?