In terms of horror movie premises, it feels like almost everything has been done, and that anything can be evil. There have been movies about killer cars, killer tomatoes, even killer clothes. Of course in the prime of social media, there had to one day be a movie about a killer app.
A killer app is a premise that seems like it might be kind of fun, but upon further inspection, it's evident that there's nowhere to really go from there. It's surely a bit of a unique idea, but ultimately what can an app really do unless it's a sentient Siri type thing and actively ruining your life. Someone with heaps and heaps of talent could probably make it work, but what's been seen so far of the premise has left a lot to be desired.
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2019's Countdown takes the killer app idea and goes in probably the most boring route it could have. Essentially, the film is about an app that predicts how long people have to live in a countdown format. The main character is a nurse named Quinn. She downloads the app after a patient of hers talks about his experience with it and is of course shocked to see that she only has two days to live. Though she doesn't believe in it at first, she does some research and finds horrific experiences other people have had and now she's scared that she will be another victim. She then meets someone else trying to escape the app, and they then try to work together to beat it.
Countdown kind of just feels like Final Destination but a lot worse. It has the same kind of premise. The characters can't escape their fate and their death. They can't escape the app. And ultimately the only way to stop the app from wreaking the havoc it does is to do exactly that and escape death. Using the app to convey this kind of plot though, just isn't nearly as effective as what Final Destination does.
Final Destination works because it's a highly entertaining formula. The audience generally knows what it's getting into, but it's somehow still full of surprises with its fun twists. It also has incredibly fun and effective death scenes, with great use of gore. Countdown is just too bland and too tame to have the same effect. None of it feels very high stakes or intense, and any deaths or gore are just not very memorable. It feels like it wants to be its own franchise, to be punchy and intense enough to gain a lot of fans, but it's just not there.
While the film isn't necessarily hard to get through upon a viewing, it just doesn't stick with the audience. Everything just feels overwhelmingly meh. It's predictable and doesn't really have a message or a theme. Nothing about it is memorable in the slightest and it just kind of comes off as average and boring. It'll completely leave the mind immediately after viewing it. Horror lovers won't be into it because it's not intense enough, thriller fans won't love it because it's not particularly thrilling. There's potential maybe for it to be good for young people who might just be getting into the genre, but there really are better ones out there to serve that purpose.
Watching Countdown and researching it is almost cringe-inducing because it's so evident that the people behind it really thought they were doing something. They thought they had a hit. There was effort put into this movie, even though it turned out to be a disaster. This is shown most evidently through their marketing. It was explicitly aimed at young people, with most marketing found on social media like TikTok. They even created a real version of the app for mobile devices, though why people would want to try something like that after the film is beyond explanation. While it didn't end up a horribly massive failure in terms of money making, it's hardly a film people would know about. It was also panned by critics in most settings, and is generally thought of as a bad movie.
The film seems to be just kind of a failure from start to finish. Any viral marketing moment they tried to achieve didn't work, because Countdown simply did not go viral. And then the movie itself. It's boring and nonsensical. It lacks any kind of meaning or message, and nothing about it is standout whatsoever. It doesn't even fall into the category of "so bad it's good" because it's not really even unique enough to be very entertaining. No one knows this movie, and to be honest it would be easy to forget that one has even seen it. Countdown is just very bland, and it's hard to even find a reason why it would be worth a watch. For that, it's very hard to recommend.
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