MOVIE CONSENSUS The Messengers is an atmospheric but derivative rip-off of countless other horror movies.
MOVIE SYNOPSIS In THE MESSENGERS, a thriller starring KRISTEN STEWART as Jess, DYLAN McDERMOTT and PENELOPE ANN MILLER as Jess' parents Roy and Denise Solomon and JOHN CORBETT as field hand John Burwell, the Solomon family has left the fast paced life of Chicago for the secluded world of a North Dakota farm. more...
MPAA RATING PG-13, for mature thematic material, disturbing violence and terror.
Create A Journal Want to see your friends' ratings and Tomatometer appear here? Create a journal and start rating films in your entries. Afterwards, invite your friends to do the same. It's FREE and only takes a couple minutes!
Order of the Phoenix Gallery
New pics from the fifth installment of the "Harry Potter" series, which promises more scary Voldemort and even more raging wizard hormones.
The plethora of horror movie cliches -- even those still residually effective -- weigh so heavily in The Messengers that whatever moments of terror that might have been had are left positively weightless.
There might be less extravagant means of communicating than throwing an entire banister at someone or unceremoniously dragging them by their feet into the cellar.
While [the Pangs] display some of the visual style that has distinguished their Asian films, nothing could compensate for the derivative, ill-plotted script.
the running motif of crows run amok has too much of Hitchcock's THE BIRDS about it to stand on its own, even in the Pang's capable hands. Then again, any script that dared use that motif was setting itself up for a fall, and that's exactly what it got
If The Messengers means to say something about all this familial and social dysfunction, that point is lost among hackneyed, decidedly unscary gyrations.
The Messengers is still worth seeing for the strength of its first half and for the consistently solid performances, but the sense of unrealized potential is tough to ignore.
It's awards season, so we'd like to nominate The Messengers for the yet-to-be-established Tippi Hedren Award for best use of malignant ravens in a motion picture.
The Messengers borrows so heavily from The Amityville Horror, The Birds, The Grudge, Poltergeist, and others that it has no room left for anything of its own.
The grown-ups fare worse: They speak . . . very . . . slowly . . . as if to pad the running time out. This may in fact be the most ridiculous performance John Corbett has ever given.
The Messengers isn't a particularly frightening or gory horror movie, but directors Danny and Oxide Pang do have a special talent for torturing the reputations of their actors.
[The film is] hampered by hauntingly lame performances by McDermott and Miller, who phone in their parts, and a screenplay that has the sophistication and complexity of a college dorm message board.
The Asian-horror-movie moment feels long since passed, both here and abroad. Let our zombies walk or even sprint again! Give our creepy kids back their pupils!
Scary awful. It’s a new genre I just made up.
The first half is very well done, making it one of the best haunted house movies since The Grudge.
Who are the Approved Tomatometer Critics?
