A movie like "Vanishing on 7th street" has two things that can work for it: firstly it has to be character driven, building upon the relationships of the people stuck within its dark premise. Secondly, it has to evolve to allow for a small bit of understanding, give us a little peek at the man behind the curtain so we go home guessing. In both categories, "Vanishing" leaves us not wanting more, but needing and expecting more. It is a waste of time.
A movie projection operator played by John Leguizamo finds himself suddenly plunged into darkness during his job. When the lights come on, the people in the movie theater, and apparently, the world, have vanished, leaving nothing behind but their clothes. This has a delicious twilight zone appeal, and as the movie set up the premise of the survivors finding each other in a bar 72 hours after zero hour, I was intrigued.
Unfortunately, this movie suffers from the same fate as the series "Lost". A premise which attracts cannot sustain without some proof that the people writing know more than the audience does about the world that they have created. Sadly, the movie is all premise with no delivery, a movie that says all that it can say within the first twenty minutes. The writer and director seem to hope that the audience's imagination can improve upon their own creation by giving us bland, unknowable scenes of vagaries that leave us slightly confused and bored rather then imparting the slightest bit of tension or fear.
It ends without giving us any satisfaction, like an M. Night Shyamalan film where the director dropped dead before he could gasp the final stupid twist into the replacement director's ear.
The characters in this movie on several occasions breathlessly gasp "I exist, I exist!" before vanishing. Perhaps this movie is about a horrible script attempting to absorb itself into nothingness, the Ouroboros of stupid movies slowly eating itself alive.
A movie projection operator played by John Leguizamo finds himself suddenly plunged into darkness during his job. When the lights come on, the people in the movie theater, and apparently, the world, have vanished, leaving nothing behind but their clothes. This has a delicious twilight zone appeal, and as the movie set up the premise of the survivors finding each other in a bar 72 hours after zero hour, I was intrigued.
Unfortunately, this movie suffers from the same fate as the series "Lost". A premise which attracts cannot sustain without some proof that the people writing know more than the audience does about the world that they have created. Sadly, the movie is all premise with no delivery, a movie that says all that it can say within the first twenty minutes. The writer and director seem to hope that the audience's imagination can improve upon their own creation by giving us bland, unknowable scenes of vagaries that leave us slightly confused and bored rather then imparting the slightest bit of tension or fear.
It ends without giving us any satisfaction, like an M. Night Shyamalan film where the director dropped dead before he could gasp the final stupid twist into the replacement director's ear.
The characters in this movie on several occasions breathlessly gasp "I exist, I exist!" before vanishing. Perhaps this movie is about a horrible script attempting to absorb itself into nothingness, the Ouroboros of stupid movies slowly eating itself alive.
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