I didn't think too much of this movie after reading the plot, but fortunately there are these pleasant surprises. Although the story is very thin, I think the acting is great. Paul Walker, whom I did not know before, is very convincing and so are the other characters. The movie is a bit dark, gloomy and sometimes you will feel lost, just like the main character. Bob Gunton is great as a priest, you will love him as you love your granddad. Don't be surprised that you will hardly find a reference from the title to the actual story. I will have to see the movie again to find out if there is one. But one thing is very clear, this is a must see if you prefer acting above action.
The Lazarus Project
2008
Action / Drama / Horror / Mystery / Thriller
The Lazarus Project
2008
Action / Drama / Horror / Mystery / Thriller
Plot summary
After Ben Garvey foolishly turned back to crime, he thought his life was over when he was sentenced to death by lethal injection. But his death sentence isn't quite what it seems, as Ben regains consciousness near an eerie psychiatric ward, where he's told he's been hired as the groundskeeper. With the state of his soul in question, and the love for his wife and daughter all the more real and powerful, Ben must figure out if he's truly cheated death, or if he's become part of something far more sinister.
Uploaded by: OTTO
December 14, 2012 at 09:50 PM
Director
Top cast
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Uncle Sam will take care of you!
No. Just No.
This is one of the worst movies I have seen in a long time. This movie was nowhere near worth the eight dollars and hour and a half of my life spent on it.
Where do I begin? Had this been a Lifetime movie, people would see just how crappy this movie really is. It really is *just* like one of those cheesy late night flicks on LMN pick-a-flick weekends.
The acting is competent, but that doesn't save the characters or story from poor writing. For a "psychological thriller" there is no depth or speck of imagination to be found. This kind of movie has been done several times in several different ways, and this version just happens to be more yawn worthy than most.
The characters are bland. Everyone is so perfectly two dimensional there's no challenge for the audience to engage in complexity of personality whatsoever.
This is a movie that tries to be more than it can. It tries to be a thriller, but the scenes are boring rather than creepy or intriguing. It tries to be a mystery, but everything is so obvious it can't be. It tries to be a suspenseful conspiracy, but it ends up falling on it's anticlimactic face with a saccharine sweet ending.
And rather than having a story that establishes a realistic situation in the beginning; the viewer is taken immediately to some bizarre parallel universe where men who don't carry guns are convicted and executed for the crimes of trigger happy cops. This same bizarre universe includes a newspaper that prints false stories, a dog named "dog," a psychiatric facility that gives entry level inmates complete run of the place, and a staff in charge so weak willed and unprepared for the event that an inmate of average intelligence figures out bullcrap for what it is.
There are some movies that succeed because they're just plain weird. There's some movies that succeed because they're just mindless entertainment. There's some movies that succeed because they can evoke a wide range of emotion within the audience. This movie FAILS on all those levels, and more.
Ridiculous concept
One of my favorite films is the Assassin,where a convicted killer is spared death only if she agrees to train and become an assassin for the government. If she refuses, she gets a bullet in the head as was originally intended. A tad preposterous but at least there's a point.
Here, we're meant to believe a man is not given a lethal injection as intended but sent to work as a groundskeeper at a facility where he is not under lock and key but told to just forget about his family which at the end of the day is his point of existence! All this so a priest/father can try and change his mindset, I would have loved to have seen the father convincing the Texas authorities to keep him alive for that purpose, that SHOULD have been the movie! And when he does get on the bus to try and go see them, the "guide" tells him not to and he just walks off the bus and doesn't try again. Then at the end, when he does go back to Texas to see them, his wife welcomes her dead husband like he's just come back from a business trip. And, of course the authorities made no attempt to stop this "dead" man return home. If you can get past these gigantic plot holes and poorly conceived ideas, I guess there's a half decent film in there but for me, zero credibility means it has no point.