| 50 |
TV Guide
The trouble isn't just that this haunted-house story, written by Mark Wheaton and directed by Hong Kong filmmakers Danny and Oxide Pang, is both formulaic and derivative. It's that it's completely free of atmosphere, the very thing that their 2002 "The Eye" had in such creepy abundance.
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| 50 |
The Onion (A.V. Club)
The Messengers, dutifully cobbles together a pastiche of successful horror films past--"The Grudge," "The Sixth Sense," "The Birds," "The Amityville Horror," and "The Shining"--without asserting a single original idea of its own.
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| 50 |
The New York Times
Matt Zoller Seitz
Like too many horror pictures, The Messengers becomes more boringly prosaic as it goes along, and there's an 11th-hour plot twist so dumb and poorly articulated that it destroys the movie. That's a shame, because shot for shot, the Pangs might be the most terrifying filmmakers alive.
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| 50 |
Variety
Though the Pangs prove culturally adaptive on a visual level, they seem completely clueless as to the tonal modalities of Mark Wheaton's admittedly undercooked, all-American script.
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| 50 |
Chicago Reader
Earns points for its set and sound design, eerily desaturated color palette, able cast, and one really good special effect. Sadly, the movie just doesn't deliver chills.
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| 50 |
Entertainment Weekly
Gregory Kirschling
There are a few decent jolts in The Messengers, but every one of them is accompanied by a cheap freak-out on the soundtrack so you know to be decently jolted.
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| 40 |
Austin Chronicle
This spook story is a surprisingly mediocre Hollywood debut for Hong Kong's Pang brothers.
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| 40 |
Los Angeles Times
Sam Adams
The Messengers is at once ruthlessly efficient and shamelessly distended.
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| 38 |
Philadelphia Inquirer
Tirdad Derakhshani
A predictable, by-the-numbers TV-movie-sized affair which will break your heart - especially since it also contains brief flashes of horror greatness.
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| 38 |
Boston Globe
The Messengers is textbook, and the course it's teaching is HSL: Horror as a Second Language.
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| 38 |
ReelViews
It's a little sad that The Messengers is ultimately a good candidate for burial in a toxic waste dump because there are some good elements contained herein.
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| 30 |
The Hollywood Reporter
A tepid ghost story filled with all the usual things that go bump in the night minus the somewhat crucial element of suspense, this bland effort from Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert's Ghost House Pictures is surprisingly devoid of the creepy, claustrophobic atmospherics that haunt the brothers' Asian work.
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| 30 |
LA Weekly
Jim Ridley
The end result looks heavily doctored: The Sam Raimi-produced feature is a badly acted, nonsensical patchwork of fake scares, crow attacks and wall-crawling CGI spooks, capped by a DVD extra of an ending that must have the real resolution gagged somewhere in a closet.
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| 25 |
New York Post
It's nicely photographed but slow-moving, dull and utterly predictable.
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| 25 |
San Francisco Chronicle
Extremely boring.
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| 10 |
Film Threat
Mark Bell
The story is so ridiculously obvious it's not even remotely enjoyable.
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