Premonition (2007)

Thursday. Monday. Saturday. Tuesday. Friday. Sunday. Wednesday.

If you believe the above to be the proper order of the days of the week, it is entirely possible you are a) sorely mistaken, b) a resident of Planet Krazy Kalendar, or c) Sandra Bullock's character, Linda Hanson, in the feature film Premonition. It's a premise so silly and gimmicky we couldn't believe it didn't die in the pitch stage. We also couldn't believe the director didn't put the credits smack dab in the middle of the movie, just to drive home how darn out of order the whole thing is.

One terrible (for her and for us, but for different reasons) morning, Linda wakes up to find a policeman at her front door, who has come calling to inform her that her husband has died in a terrible car accident out at mile marker 220. Unfortunately, the police weren't able to get to her until this morning, and Linda and her two daughters are quite upset by the news. After falling asleep in a stupor, Linda wakes up to find her husband sitting in the kitchen enjoying his morning cup of coffee It is now the previous Monday, and her husband is still alive.

By Monday night, Linda believes the previous day was nothing more than a terrible dream. That is, until she wakes up next on Saturday morning to find her husband dead, her family preparing for his funeral later that morning, her daughter's face marred with unexplained and unsightly cuts, and pretty much everyone around Linda thinking she's lost her mind. By the end of the day, Linda's family has decided that she is responsible not only for the cuts on her daughter's face but as well for the murder of her husband. By the time Saturday night has come and gone, Linda has been committed to mental institution. Good thing she wakes up next the previous Tuesday.

In fairness, Premonition earns its spooky cred exactly two times: the first time we find out Linda's husband is dead, and the first time we find out he isn't. After that, the drawn out ways in which the movie tells us her husband is once again alive (or dead) become laughable, seeing as her husband is dead one day and alive the next (or vice versa) six times in the movie.

By Tuesday, Linda starts to get the picture. Having been committed to the most sinister sanitorium since a fair maiden sang "I Love My Love" from a tower at Bedlam, Linda sets to finding out answers. Using a piece of oak tag and a marker, she plots out the days she's already lived and recollects which events took place on which day. By doing this, she deduces that she still has Friday (after Jim dies) and Sunday (before Jim dies) to figure out how not to end up all tied up in the booby hatch and covered in Saturday. But why would Linda know that she is stuck inside of one exact calendar week, and that she would experience the day of Jim's death last of all those days? Why has this housewife in the suburbs become so comfortable with the concept of time travel so quickly that she inherently understands that it will fit into an exact frame of days of her own deciding? Why wouldn't she just as easily fall asleep one night and wake up the next day in, say, the Crusades, or the future? It is as if Linda is aware of the plot of the movie and has decided to play along.

It would be easy to suspend disbelief if this were the only inconsistency in the movie. But it's not, though. For example, the film ends after a fateful climax at mile marker 220 early Wednesday morning. Linda thinks she has saved her husband, who pulls over to the side of the road in the nick of time, only to pull back into traffic at her insistence and then quickly get obliterated by an oncoming tanker. In the timeline of the movie, she runs toward the fire, cries, pounds the ground in sorrow, and...credits. But in the timeline of the planet, we are to assume that Linda turned her car around, drove home, did some light chores, picked her daughters up from school, didn't tell them that their father was dead, went to sleep, and then woke up the next morning to find a cop on her doorstep. A cop, by the way, who probably would have been on the scene of a fiery highway crash the previous day and would have talked to witnesses, such as the dead man's wife. Before the movie even started, Linda Hanson drove away from the scene of a manslaughter. I would say it's no wonder that her family wanted to have her committed, but no one every found out she spent Wednesday morning at the scene of a murder and Wednesday night not telling anyone about it.

Even more strangely is that it took until Thursday for the police to inform Linda her husband had died. After all, mile marker 220 was in the middle of a well-paved road not far from her home, and it seems that notifying the family would have been law enforcement's top priority. Then again, it is doubtful the police even needed to tell her, seeing as this fatal accident probably would have broken into regular programming on her local news station, as well as showing up in every traffic report for several hours afterwards. If Linda didn't want to find out her husband was dead until Thursday, she had to go pretty far out of her way to ignore it.

And then, there's the small matter of the little girl's face. On Tuesday, Linda's older daughter sustained a household injury when she ran face first into a sliding glass door in an attempt to escape a thunderstorm. Her face get pretty well crunked up, and when we first see her (on Saturday), her wounds look pretty bad. So it's extremely odd that the first day in the movie's timeline -- that would be Thursday -- features several shots of the daughter, and NONE OF THEM SHOW EVEN A SCRATCH ON HER LITTLEPUNIM. And as much as you can let the movie's absurdity off the hook because it's a genre piece that has to rewrite the rules a little, you can't argue that faceful of glass would send a girl to the emergency room on Tuesday, heal completely by Thursday, and look its worst on Saturday because that's the day for everyone to look sad and crazy.

Even the dead cannot escape such a brazen lack of continuity. On Saturday, the day of the funeral (and the day is goes aaaaaaaaall wrong for Linda), Linda devises a theory that her husband isn't really dead (after all, she just saw him alive yesterday and tomorrow) and demands to see the inside of the coffin. The pallbearers listen to her request for some reason, despite the funeral director's shouted protests that Jim sustained some "severing" as a result of his accident. The coffin hits the ground, and Jim's head comes rolling on out. Considering the giant explosion that killed him looked like a scene out of The Marine, I'd say Jim got off easy with a severed head.

Perhaps it would have been a more compelling argument for incarceration had anyone known Linda was at the scene of the crime. After all, it bears mentioning that Jim was driving out of town so he could cheat on Linda with this new blond from the office named Claire. He deserves exactly what he gets, and she's just the right person to give it to him, however inadvertently. Instead of being an awesome revenge fantasy, though, Linda pusses out and visits a priest in the movie's final act, who blames her predicament on a culture that doesn't believe in anything anymore. And that's why Thursday now comes before Monday. Because god doesn't like Sandra Bullock.

In conclusion, not one character in Premonition ever has so much as one premonition. Credits.