COUNTDOWN (2019)

Studio:      STX Films
Director:    Justin Dec
Writer:      Justin Dec
Producer:  John Rickard, Zack Schiller, John Morris, Sean Anders
Stars:     Elizabeth Lail, Jordan Calloway, Talitha Bateman, Tichina Arnold, P.J. Byrne, Peter Facinelli, Dillon Lane, Matt Letscher, Valente Rodriguez, Tom Segura, Anne Winters

Review Score:

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Summary:

A cursed cellphone app that reveals how much time a person has left to live wreaks havoc on a young nurse struggling to save her sister and a new friend.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Partying teenagers download an app called ‘Countdown’ that predicts exactly when its users will die. Courtney becomes distressed when she learns she has only three hours to live.

Upon leaving the party, Courtney refuses a ride from her drunken boyfriend Evan. Courtney immediately receives a notification from Countdown that she violated her user agreement.

When her timer expires, a supernatural entity kills Courtney in her bathroom at home. At the same time, Evan crashes his car. A tree branch impales the passenger seat where Courtney would have sat.

In the hospital, Evan explains what happened to Courtney while showing the app to recently graduated nurse Quinn Harris. Quinn dismisses Evan’s worry that he will die during his scheduled surgery, which is when his timer is set to expire.

Quinn and her hospital coworkers download the app. Quinn learns she has less than three days left to live.

Quinn goes to her widower father Charlie’s house to pick up her birth certificate. Quinn briefly encounters her younger sister Jordan. Quinn also talks to her father, who invites Quinn to come to the cemetery to honor her dead mother Jamie’s birthday.

Worried about his death sentence, Evan hides when it comes time for his surgery. Evan receives a notification that he broke Countdown’s user agreement. Courtney’s ghost kills Evan in a hospital stairwell.

Evan’s curious death compels Quinn to unlock Evan’s cellphone using his dead body. Quinn sees Evan’s expired Countdown timer.

Quinn calls her father to say she can’t join him at the cemetery after all. Quinn receives a notification that she violated Countdown’s user agreement.

Quinn pushes back against Dr. Sullivan’s unwanted and aggressive sexual advance. Sullivan prevents Quinn from reporting his behavior to her supervisor Nurse Amy.

Quinn researches Countdown online. Quinn reads stories and watches videos of people who claim to have seen ghosts before being supernaturally killed because of the app.

Quinn smashes her cellphone after seeing a vision of Evan as a demon. Hoping to stay with her sister, Jordan comes to see Quinn and asks about the app. Quinn insists Jordan cannot stay with her and also warns her sister to not download Countdown.

Quinn purchases a brand new cellphone from quirky cellular storeowner Derek King. Quinn becomes irate when she discovers Countdown automatically installed on her new device.

A demonic vision causes Quinn to crash her car in the parking lot. Having overheard her mention the app, fellow store patron Matt Monroe tells Quinn he has been seeing ghosts too.

Quinn and Matt go to a bar to discuss their experiences with the app. The couple convinces drunken conspiracy theorist Gerry to download Countdown so they can review the terms and conditions. Matt recounts that he cancelled a train trip. Adding that she cancelled a planned event too, Quinn and Matt realize they broke the terms of their preordained fates, enabling the app to kill them regardless.

Quinn and Matt seek help from hospital chaplain Father David. Father David refers the duo to Father John, an eccentric priest obsessed with demonology.

Nurse Amy pulls Quinn aside to meet with Dr. Sullivan and representatives from Human Resources. To preemptively combat an accusation from Quinn, Sullivan successfully convinces HR that Quinn made inappropriate passes at him. HR suspends Quinn, who angrily storms out of the conference. While waiting for Quinn, Matt encounters a ghostly vision of his dead little brother Jeff in a hospital bathroom.

Quinn and Matt visit Father John. Father John compares the couple’s claims about the app to an ancient story about the demon Ozhin. Father John claims he can find out more if he can see the app’s programming code.

Quinn and Matt bribe Derek to hack the app, which Derek reveals he also downloaded. When Derek accesses a file of Countdown’s users, Quinn learns her sister downloaded the app and is scheduled to die three minutes before her. Derek hacks the code to add multiple years to everyone’s timers.

Matt spends the night with Quinn. Matt tells Quinn about his guilt regarding his brother Jeff’s death. Quinn tells Matt she blames herself for her mother getting killed by a drunk driver.

Another ghoul attacks Quinn during the night. Everyone’s timers suddenly revert to their original countdowns.

Her mother’s demonic ghost haunts Jordan. Quinn and Matt collect Jordan and return to Father John.

After translating the programming code written in Latin, Father John identifies Countdown as a curse that can be broken. Father John says they must fool the demon by either having someone die before their predetermined time or else outlast the clock.

With only a few minutes remaining until Matt’s scheduled death, Father John has everyone create a protection circle with salt. The demon stalks the circle as supernatural activity overtakes the priest’s basement. A vision of Jeff lures Matt out of the circle. An unseen force pulls Matt outside where he is killed by a passing truck at the same time his cancelled train derails.

Quinn rushes Jordan to the hospital to treat a wound sustained during the commotion. Quinn plots to save her sister by trying to kill Dr. Sullivan since Countdown predicted he would live for decades. However, an unseen presence protects the doctor.

The demon attacks Jordan in the hospital’s old morgue. Despite interference from a vision of her dead mother, Quinn injects herself with a fatal dose of morphine to die before her scheduled time and save her sister. The demon vanishes and Jordan survives. Following instructions left behind by her sister, Jordan uses a syringe of Narcan to revive Quinn.

Quinn and Jordan accompany their father to their mother’s grave. News breaks that Dr. Sullivan is going to prison for serial sexual abuse. However, Quinn becomes shocked when she sees ‘Countdown 2.0’ automatically downloading to her phone.

Derek goes on a Tinder date with a disinterested woman. Left alone in the darkened restaurant, the demon attacks Derek.

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Review:

What would you do if you knew exactly when you were going to die and how long you had left to live? You wouldn’t spend any remaining minutes watching “Countdown” because that would be a tragic misuse of your time.

In this 2019 version of the endlessly recycled “young adults are supernaturally tormented after inadvertently invoking a curse” setup, a mysterious cellphone app called ‘Countdown’ provides users with an ominous timer ticking down to their deaths. These expiration dates are non-news for anyone destined to live to a ripe old age. For those with significantly less time, discovering you have only days or even hours left in your lifespan can be a serious cause for concern.

Naturally, no one reads the terms and conditions upon downloading the app. If they did, they’d know trying to sidestep your fate constitutes a breach of the user agreement.

What does the penalty entail? Courtney finds out firsthand in the film’s overlong prologue. Dared to download Countdown while partying with her high school friends, Courtney learns she is set to die that night. Rattled by the prediction, the 17-year-old wisely refuses a ride from her drunk boyfriend that would overlap with her timer’s endpoint. Courtney immediately receives a notification that she violated the app’s terms.

When her countdown eventually expires, a paranormal presence throws the girl around her bathroom. At the same time, a tree branch impales the passenger seat where Courtney should have been sitting. One way or another, Courtney was destined to die.

This “can’t escape a preordained death” premise comes packed with imaginative “what if” possibilities. What if someone appeared on live TV or in a crowded public space at his/her appointed kill time? What if someone tried waiting out the final hour in the middle of a desert with no external dangers for miles around? What if numerous people had identical timers, indicating an extinction event mystery they had to solve and prevent to save their city?

“Countdown” doesn’t care about getting creative with its potential. While the film could have fun ratcheting up suspense with gruesome guessing games over what domino line of death will trigger someone’s demise, we see from the first scene that when Countdown’s demon has no other option, he just supernaturally slams someone’s head on a bathtub. Instead of clever kills, we get a ghoul invisibly tossing one guy down stairs and another guy paranormally pulled into the street to be struck by a passing truck. Snore.

The demon doing these deeds doesn’t even have a distinct design. He looks like a mud-covered vagrant dressed in rags. In a wishful thinking alternate universe where “Countdown” turned into a hit worth franchising, I can’t imagine how Funko would reduce the evil entity into a uniform Pop figure since he’s already minimized into a lackluster visual.

If I didn’t know better, I’d assume “Countdown” was made by pre-huge success Blumhouse. I can only assume producers either couldn’t swing a meeting with Blum or else Jason passed because it isn’t 2014 anymore.

However, “Countdown” is executive produced by Gregory Plotkin, who co-produced “Area 51” (review here), edited “Happy Death Day” (review here), and directed “Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension” (review here) among other projects. So someone with a hand on the film’s wheel still intimately understands Blumhouse’s multiplex-friendly formula from every available angle.

“Countdown” features Blumhouse’s basic brand of sterile scares suited for slumber parties, a clean look and lean edit, an easy-to-follow story, and a photogenic cast with vaguely recognizable names like Peter Facinelli playing comparatively uncomplicated characters. “You know the drill” plot points include running to a priest for a healthy dose of mid-movie exposition, unearned guilt over a loved one’s untimely death (“if it wasn’t for me, she wouldn’t have been hit by that drunk driver!”), and a pair of people providing comic relief to give the movie a pinch of snickering attitude.

This is all well and good when vanilla works fine as a flavor. For sprinkles, syrups, or anything with a slight splash of color, “Countdown” comes up empty handed on toppings.

Sticking with food metaphors, “Countdown” answers the question, what would a cheap Little Caesar’s Hot-N-Ready look like in PG-13 horror film form? It’s not as bad as Pizza Hut, but we’re still talking mass-market chain chow made from the most plainly palatable ingredients possible. It technically qualifies as pizza, but it’s not what you order when you want to satisfy your taste buds. It’s what you scarf down to stop your stomach from screaming, and quickly fades into the forgotten file of countless other dinner orders ultimately indistinguishable from one another.

NOTE: There is a mid-credits scene.

Review Score: 40

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