Linda (Sandra Bullock) is having a unique martial crisis. Her husband Jim (Julian McMahon) has died in a horrific car accident and she must now raise their two daughters by her lonesome. Or so she thinks, because she wakes up the next night and Jim is alive and well and enjoying a hot cup of java. Linda is perplexed and finds herself living the days of this week out of sequence. One day Jim is alive and the next day he isn’t. She plots to use her knowledge to save her husband if it’s even possible to defy fate.

Premonition is in hopeless want to be a modern-day version of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five with the added sprinkle of a Lifetime movie. Linda is, like in Vonnegut’s classic sci-fi novel, unstuck in her time, however, the time has been pared down significantly to a mere week. Thankfully the movie has enough sense not to implicitly try to make sense of why this is happening to her, though she does visit a priest who has conveniently studied this sort of crazy thing (short answer: God is testing your faith). The problem with limiting the timeline to just seven days is that when Linda makes her quantum leaps the audience is left scrambling to figure out when she is. This works in placing the audience alongside Linda in confusion, but it gives no sense of overview or clarity and the events aren’t significant enough to warrant being memorable enough to connect cause and effect. The narrative structure is purposely jumbled but it’s also missing suspense if we never know what’s going on. Hey, I’m not even asking for much either, just some titles indicating the days would be helpful.

The people that populate this film behave in completely contrite ways because the half-baked story demands it of them. When Linda finds her daughter’s face covered in scratches for the first time, she asks what happened to her. Instead of actually answering, the child remains silent because apparently that would spoil the dramatic surprise of her running into a glass door. Wow, that was worth it, and it must have been something so traumatic that neither of Linda’s daughters could casually mention it. A child would not behave this way. The only way this would make sense is if the contriteness got kicked up a notch and the little girl got a sliding door-bound case of laryngitis. Like romantic comedies, Premonition is a movie that needs to survive due to no one ever having a rationale conversation explaining all that they know to dispel misconceptions. This whole dumb sliding door incident is made even worse when Linda’s mother wants to have the children removed from their mother’s custody because of those scratches. Huh? Would she not know too that it was an accident? And just one more reason to hate this plot point: when Linda tells her daughters that their daddy is dead the little girl does not have scratches, however, in the timeline, she ran into the door the day before. The day after the death, and two days after she broke the door, the glass is replaced because I suppose that took priority over mourning. The discontinuity is terrible.

Also, when Linda gets the tiniest whiff that her (sometimes dearly departed) husband was even contemplating infidelity, she performs a full 180 on the spot and coldly considers letting him die as punishment. The speed of her abrupt about-face is a cheap roadblock to squeeze more tension out of this dumb story. I won’t even mention how lazy it is to have a priest who’s an expert on “unstuck time” living nearby.

The plot may be maddening, but I think Premonition was meant to be a comedy because it’s not an effective thriller. The movie’s feeble attempts at attaching scares to its central puzzle are astounding bad. This is the type of film that not only thinks a dead crow is spooky but that the mystery of what happened to the dead crow is integral to audience satisfaction. It’s hard to believe that Premonition preoccupies so much time with the mini timeline of one dead bird. There are cheap jump scares in abundance but no lasting tension of sense of unease because the filmmakers have left the audience in the dark. There is one horrendous moment where the funeral pallbearers drop the casket and Jim’s head snaps and rolls out. You know they’re not getting any repeat business.

Premonition has an ending that just lays there in utter defiance of taste, causing the audience to upturn their nose in disbelief as if they had just discovered someone defecating in a store aisle. The ending is terrible and grasps for some kind of deeper Twilight Zone level of irony, but instead what comes across is a clumsy, irritating, and plain idiotic excuse at futility. It really calls into question whether or not the movie had any point. Premonition was beyond redemption but its stinker of an ending and Linda’s voice over summation will cause you to roll your eyes at incredible speeds.

Bullock is in new territory with Premonition, though she dabbled with time travel in last year’s The Lake House. She’s in way over her head and cannot effectively convey any of Linda’s increasingly ragged emotions. I laughed out loud several times as Bullock tried to express her growing apprehension, and her take on the line, “Because we’re running out of time,” had me in stitches. Her performance isn’t particularly embarrassing but more of an exasperating reaction to all the mess surrounding her. Bullock may want to stick to her romantic comedy wheelhouse.

Personally, if I was unstuck through time and needed some help figuring out important events, I would leave a lot of Post-It notes for myself filling me in on what I know. That would make sense; this movie doesn’t in any capacity. Bullock, writer Bill Kelly, and director Mennan Yapo need to wake up the day before they ever started to make Premonition and then they can spare us all. Then again, I suppose we can only fight fate one sliding door at a time.

Nate’s Grade: D+