Mini-Review : Countdown (2019 Film) – For Everyone Who Thought Final Destination Was Too Exciting

This movie is an uninspired knock-off and I hate it.

SUMMARY (Spoilers, but who gives a crap)

There’s an app that tells you when you’re going to die, down to the second. However, even if you try to avoid your fate, it ensures that you die, because the “user agreement” specifically says that you can’t use the information to avoid your fate.

Image result for countdown film
What a normal looking loading screen for an app that does 1 single thing. 

Quinn (Elizabeth Lail) a nurse with a harassing boss, a dead mom, a somewhat estranged sister, and no personality, downloads the app after a patient tells her that it’s real and then he dies. She finds out that she’s set to die in 3 days. She tries to remove the app from her phone and meets Matt (Jordan Calloway), who conveniently has a slightly shorter countdown and is also freaked out. They go to see a priest who tells them that the app is actually a demonic curse by the demon Ozhin, who gets to torment them until their deaths because they tried to avoid their fate… by an app that Ozhin apparently created. The curse can only be broken by proving the app wrong, which Quinn does by killing herself in a way that allows her to be revived, but then there’s a sequel hook anyway because f*ck this movie.

END SUMMARY

Remember Final Destination, a film series containing a number of entertainingly elaborate deaths designed to ensure that people can’t really cheat their fate? Didn’t you wish that most of those deaths had been sudden or simple and off-screen? Then this is the movie for you. Rather than elaborate death traps, we occasionally get flashes of a demon in cameras or mirrors, but nothing he does is ever really that scary or creepy, unless the victims participate in it. Even then, that’s like 10 minutes of the movie, max. Most of the film is just people trying to figure out how to get into the phone and seeing if altering the code changes your fate. There are like 3 different pointless subplots which seem cobbled together so that the runtime could reach 90 minutes, including Quinn trying to kill her boss so that his app is wrong, because he’s a sexual harasser. I mean, I wouldn’t mourn him, but the fact that she finds out that hell is real and then plans to commit murder kind of suggests she isn’t smart. Maybe go get a blessing and baptism from the priest and enjoy eternal paradise, cuz apparently Catholicism is incidentally the correct religion?  

Image result for countdown film
The moral is to read User Agreements.

The biggest problem is the premise: The App tells you you’re going to die, but if you try to avoid it, you just get killed at the same time as you would have died if the app never existed in the first place. In other words, you’re not cheating anything or getting any benefit. Apparently, Ozhin created this just because it gives him the ability to mess with people. Not to drag them to hell or to steal their souls, just to mess with them. So a demon creates a very popular application which exposes the fact that apparently Heaven and Hell are undeniably real and that’s just to mess with a handful of people who were going to die anyway.  It’s just so damned dumb.

If you want to check out some more by the Joker on the Sofa, check out the 100 Greatest TV Episodes of All TimeCollection of TV EpisodesCollection of Movie Reviews, or the Joker on the Sofa Reviews.

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jokeronthesofa

I'm not giving my information to a machine. Nice try, Zuckerberg.

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