Flatliners (1990)

June 25, 2010

On-Demand, Seattle, WA

This was not the first time I saw this movie.

** / ****

By Scott Muoio

Flatliners is an incredibly silly movie that has not aged well 20 years after the fact. The movie has style but no grace, a great premise but a sledgehammer approach, and despite ample opportunity to shine instead relies on giving the face of life after death a goofy Brat Pack grin. Indeed, Flatliners takes a handful of 1990’s hottest young actors, sets them in motion as driven, egomaniacal medical students looking for a thrill, and caps the whole thing off with a spooky life after death moral that is impossibly hard to swallow. It’s exotically tantalizing to imagine dying for up to 10 minutes only to be revived just before the point of no return – but to watch this group squabble about it like tantrum throwing toddlers kills both the intrigue and fun faster than you can say, “go toward the bright white light.”

Looking at the film in retrospect, Director Joel Schumacher foreshadows his homoerotic, codpiece extravaganza Batman and Robin by letting the earnest actors go beyond merely taking things dead serious. His famous faces don’t merely act the lines, they emote them in ways that might make William Shatner blush. In addition, Schumacher uses gaudy, out of place sets, repetitive action scenes, and an incredibly goofy moral (your childhood sins will come back to haunt you when you die!) to turn the film from a philosophical mind bender into an excuse for his stylistic fetishes. Indeed, between the campy red and blue lenses that punctuate the dream/death sequences to the absurd Gothic cathedral med school locations, the angular camera shots to the intensely serious line delivery, and of course some truly absurd dialogue (“Back to work… or suffer the consequences!”) Flatliners falls way off balance the camp teeter-totter. You’ll have fun watching the first half but by the time the sins materialize at corporeal incarnations you’ll be begging for someone to pull the plug.

Director: Joel Schumacher

Producer: Michael Douglas, Rick Bieber

Writer: Peter Filardi

Starring: Kiefer Sutherland, Julia Roberts, Kevin Bacon, William Baldwin, Oliver Platt

Original Music: Lincoln Chase, James Newton Howard, David A. Stewart

Cinematographer: Jan de Bont

Editor: Robert Brown