[yasr_overall_rating]
A young woman wakes up in a seemingly evacuated hospital with a hurricane approaching. She realizes the storm has awakened malevolent forces, trapping her in a time loop. She must escape the hospital before the storm passes or she will be trapped in its halls forever.
“Inoperable” starts out somewhat interesting but very quickly turns into a boring, formulaic horror thriller. The only redeeming aspect of the movie is its star, Danielle Harris, who many of you might remember from Rob Zombie’s abomination remakes of “Halloween” and “Halloween II.” While she was part of a good ensemble with those two films, here, she is the star, and it is apparent early on that director Christopher Lawrence Chapman is not up to the challenge. Ms. Harris has the opportunity, many times, to show just how good she is but for some reason, she seems to be holding most of her emotions back, probably at the behest of Mr. Chapman, and that is part of why this movie fails. In a horror film, emotion is key because you want your audience to connect with and, ultimately, root for the protagonist but here, quite honestly, we just don’t care.
Mr. Chapman also has a fondness for lingering camera shots. In a horror movie, when a character approaches a door, the point is to build anticipation, to make the audience think that something is going to jump out at them but sometimes, the director will refrain from doing so and when that moment passes, and the character walks out of shot, occasionally, the director will let the empty frame linger a little longer than usual, maybe it’s because they want us to see a slight face in the shadows, or maybe it’s false expectancy, fooling us into thinking something will happen, thereby heightening our senses for when the moment actually arrives but here, Mr. Chapman continues to let characterless shots endure onscreen with no apparent payoff. This happens early on and originally I thought maybe it was just his particular shooting style but it prevails throughout the entire film and quickly becomes tedious to the point of ad nauseum.
What semblance of a story there is centers on Amy Barrett (Danielle Harris), a young woman who gets caught up in a seemingly neverending nightmare. As she and thousands more sit in backed-up traffic in Florida as a Category 5 hurricane approaches, she suddenly blacks out and wakes up in a hospital. Not remembering how she arrived there, she gets a feel for her surroundings and walks out into the hallway only to discover that it is empty. A voice booms over the intercom, asking everyone to stay in their rooms until the hospital staff can get to them and help them evacuate the building before the storm makes landfall. She obliges but when nobody arrives, she ventures out into the dark and mysterious ward. She begins to see strange things and when two nurses approach her and force her to the ground, cutting her with a scalpel, she quickly wakes up in her car, stuck in traffic again, exactly where we were introduced to her in the beginning.
Puzzled, she searches the car for clues and then she suddenly wakes up in the hospital again. This becomes the norm for the next 85 minutes, she wakes up in her car, cannot escape, then she wakes up in the hospital once more. While in the medical facility, she meets two other people, Jen (Katie Keene) and her boyfriend/husband Ryan (Jeff Denton). They, like her, keep waking up in the hospital, experience something traumatic, and then start all over again. During a brief conversation, Ryan mentions something about the storm having demolished a nearby military base where he heard they were performing strange experiments and now all three of them are caught in some kind of a time loop as a result. They cannot die in the hospital but keep experiencing the same day over and over. Imagine “Groundhog Day” without humor, drama, and Bill Murray, or “Edge of Tomorrow” minus the action, sci-fi spectacle, and Tom Cruise, and you might have an idea of just how bad “Inoperable” is.
In both the aforementioned “Groundhog Day” and “Edge of Tomorrow,” every time the day is reset, it does so for a reason. With “Groundhog Day,” Bill Murray’s narcissistic and arrogant TV weatherman Phil Connors gets stuck reliving the same day repeatedly but in having to do so, he slowly comes to the realization that he is indeed an arrogant twat, and as he sees himself for what he truly is, he decides to become a better person and ultimately, learns his lesson and gets the girl. In “Edge of Tomorrow,” Tom Cruise’s Major William Cage goes through the exact same situation, reliving the same day over and over but here, its sole purpose is to turn Cage from a coward into a hero and in order to get there, every time his day resets, he must follow the clues if he is to achieve his objective. With “Inoperable,” Amy keeps reliving the same day again and again but in this instance, there is no objective, no lesson to be learned so she can become a better human being, the story keeps resetting so doctors and nurses in the hospital who have turned into lunatics, can cut people up and pull their insides out. That appears to be the movie’s sole objective and nothing else.
It’s almost like director Christopher Lawrence Chapman realized in the editing room that his movie was not very good so he tried to salvage it at the very end by adding a surprise twist but in doing so, it totally negates everything else that happened up to this point so in essence, the whole film becomes ambiguous. All the talk about government experiments and time loops simply vanish and then logically, you don’t have a movie any more. I like that Mr. Chapman actually completed his film, as an indie filmmaker myself I understand the difficulties one has to go through to get one made but without first having a good script, you’re doomed from the very beginning.
“Inoperable” will be available nationwide on DVD, Cable VOD and Digital HD February 6th
