Onward (but maybe not upward) we move on to the third movie in this series. That movie poster is kind of hokey looking, so it leads me to worry that the movie might be bad as well. I have a bad feeling about this. Usually at least the posters can make a movie look good, even if it isn't the best. Sigh.
This movie continues where the second movie left off, I guess. I'm not sure because the movie never really tells us anything about when it's supposed to be taking place, and the characters are all new, which leaves their connection to the events of the first movie unknown. Anyway, this movie takes place in a world that at least knows about the existence of scanners to an extent, because the main character is a woman who suffered experiments at the hands of her adoptive father and another psychiatrist who wanted to test her powers. She's all grown up now, and she discovers that her powers can be used to control others. She plans to team up with other scanners and take over the world. Her estranged brother learns of her plans and comes back to stop her.
The main character is majorly unlikable. I know the movie tries to say it's just the side effects of the drugs, but I didn't like her from the beginning. I think the drugs just gave her an excuse to unleash her inner evil. Her father must have been ridiculously unobservant not to realize what a crazy bitch she is. You don't hand someone like that the chance to use super dangerous powers without any kind of consequences. There's a meme floating around the internet hinting that the world would be chaos if hangovers didn't exist, because people would get insanely drunk if there were no consequences to their behavior. This movie posits a similar idea, that the scanners don't try to take over the world because the side effects of their powers keep them in check. Bad people who would use their powers to hurt people are deterred by the pain their powers cause. Remove the pain, and bad people with bad powers will start to do bad things.
It really is an interesting idea, and seeing people use their scanner powers without the painful anguish "hangover" that we saw in the first two films is cool and creepy, but it's overshadowed by the hokiness of the acting and the events that take place onscreen. It's almost like this movie is a cheesy sitcom and all the characters pause after every scene waiting for the audience to laugh. It gets annoying.
It's also annoying to see the gore and action scenes, because there are a lot of sequences that are similar to ones that happen in the first two movies, but without the heart or soul or impact. We cringe when someone's head explodes in the first movie because there was tension built up in the prior scenes and we gave at least half a shit what happened to those characters. In this movie a guy's head explodes and people fly around and eyes roll back in heads and turn white, and it would all be very scary if we had any kind of reason to care or feel tense. The characters in this movie feel like caricatures instead of real people, so I just didn't care what happened to them.
There's a scene at the beginning of the movie where someone is nearly crushed to death, and that scene managed to be tense, so that gave me hope. The lead actress in this movie also manages to exude menace, and she could be an interesting villain if she reigned in her over-the-top tendencies. It's like there are elements of a good movie here, but the filmmakers never manage to make them come together, and that makes me sad, because I really liked the second movie and I was hoping this one would be worth watching as well. You can safely skip this movie and not worry about missing much.
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