This contains spoilers.

Rating: 1/10 (31 January 2003)

I absolutely hated this film. First off, the acting was atrocious. I have not seen such a miscast group in a very long time. The children were overly cute, the female lead spent more time worrying about her hair than studying the character, and I'm pretty sure the male lead was a model. They were stiff and wooden, and entirely unconvincing. Every emotion was overdone; I felt as if I were watching theatre (and not in the good way). And the lead female character was a total monster (which was a complete departure from the original). That actress butchered that part, being calm on second, hysterical the next, flirting with her ex-husband and showing no real personality under the surface of classic modern sarcastic bitchiness.
The direction was brutal. A good director could have at least made some improvement in the acting, but sometimes I got the feeling that no one had even screened the film after it was made. In on scene, the mother enters her son's bedroom, looks at his bed, and the shot of what was supposed to be her line of vision was actually at ceiling height looking down. And oh my God the dialog. I wrote better dialog in stories when I was eight. Predictable, simple and completely lacking any flow. It was also overly flirty and sarcastic a la Dawson's Creek, that distracted the viewer from even the possibility of setting a suspenseful mood. Which then brings me to the unbelievably annoying subplot of the rekindled romance between the two leads. Totally unnecessary and so nauseatingly Hollywood. Once again we find a director who falls back on ridiculous notions of sexualization for the sole purpose of fattening up weak material, and subsequently failing miserably. Then we come to the plot problems. While the film overexplained a million tiny details, it ignored numerous necessary points, such as the chronology of the horse family's events, and the girl's psychic abilities. She obviously could control events/actions with her mind, yet there wasn't even an attempt to explain how. Also there was a complete lack of explanation of where the girl came from and/or why she was evil. Yet the film spoon fed certain details to the audience, to the point of choking. Us hearing the voice on the phone, the extended first death scene, the water oozing out of the television, what was up with that whole Before you die you see the ring nonsense? Which was, incidentally, totally inconsistent as the boyfriend was not drawing on magazine faces or scribbling circles before he died! And what was with that stupid female lead getting knocked into the well? Most rediculous scene ever! And then we come to the ending, which was so obviously complete left open for a sequel, and in doing so, dropped all moral implications of the tape. Instead of the ending in Ring (where the mother asks her father to watch the film and die, giving up his life to save that of his grandchild, and effectively ending the cycle), in the remake, they imply that all that matters is saving the son, regardless of who sees the film and if the cycle continues. It is appalling that this film was able to be made.