The premise is kind of creepy; the threat is unusual; the scenes of horror are gruesomely horrific. What this movie seems to lack is characters. Well, I’ll clarify that: It lacks characters who have any depth, characters who would be of any interest to us apart from the circumstance in which they find themselves.
This is somewhat surprising, considering the source material is the novel of the same name by Scott Smith. Though I haven’t read the book, I assume something has been lost in translation. Yet Smith also adapted the screenplay from his own book, so I’m bewildered. First-time director Carter Smith (no relation to Scott) was a fashion photographer, so maybe he’s to blame for being more concerned with how his protagonists look than what’s going on in their heads.
In a nutshell, two twenty-something couples on Spring break in Mexico decide to take a little trip off the beaten path to see some lost Mayan ruins. These ruins aren’t on any map, avoiding the usual tourist mobs. They are talked into the excursion by a young German searching for his missing brother, who was involved with the archeological team working at the ruins.
Of course, those ill-fated archeologists also found something else, and when our five budding (hey, that’s a pun!) explorers get to the ruins there is not much left of the archeological team but their deserted camp, pitched right atop the vine-covered ziggurat. Also, now they’re trapped, because some of the locals—descendants of the Mayans—set up a parameter around the ruins and, armed with guns and bows-and-arrows, make it abundantly clear that the tourists aren’t going anywhere.
There is a neat revelation as to why the locals are so coldblooded and will not let the pretty young Americans leave. To say anything more about that reason or about the threat contained in the ruins would pretty much give away the plot (although you’d have to have been living in a sensory deprivation chamber not to know: Keep an eye on the plants). Which brings me back to what I can say about the characters: not much.
There’s the whiny “good” girl (Jena Malone) who doesn’t want to leave the comfort of the hotel for places not on the map: she even wears flip-flops to trek through the jungle! Her boyfriend Jeff (Jonathan Tucker), a med school student, is the sober, responsible one of the party. Stacy (Laura Ramsey) is the spunky “girls-just-wanta-have-fun” blonde who has the assigned job of showing off some skin—though later she shows off parts of herself that will cause more queasy audience members to cover their eyes. Mathias (Joe Anderson) is the somewhat cryptic German who serves as tour guide into the unknown. Eric (Shawn Ashmore), looking like Dominic Monaghan in Lost, is a nice guy, but I really don’t have much more that I can say about him, or about any of these people.
My problem is this: we spend two days in a pressure-cooker situation with these characters, two days that for some or all of them (no spoilers here) will be their last. And yet we do not know much more about them at the end of the two days than we did when we first met them lounging beside the pool at their ritzy hotel. For a screenplay written by a novelist from his own book, this is intolerable.
I have said it so many times, but Hollywood lately has had me reciting it like a mantra: an effective horror film’s first and foremost priority is to introduce believable, sympathetic protagonists. We have to invest in the characters to care about their fate. Fully nine-tenths of horror movies I see were made by people who don’t seem to have grasped this.
These hip, educated, twenty-first-century Americans have two days to sit around and reflect on their own mortality. Granted, under the circumstances a good deal of this will be spent alternately plotting the best way to survive (Do we wait for help or make a run for it?) and having hysterical outbursts. But what about some deeper psychological revelations? Where are the trenches-inspired reflections on life and death? The only time any character gets off the subject of the matter at hand is when one of the girls throws a temper tantrum over her mistaken belief that the other gal was getting it on with her boyfriend. The degrees of shallowness these characters reveal is mind-numbing. The iPods, iPhones, Blackberries, and Bluetooths have sucked out their brains long before the plants could do it.
To give the actors some credit, they do play their parts believably. I just wish their parts had more substance to them. When cringe-inducingly violent scenes occur, involving very primitive surgery and plants wriggling under the skin like parasitic worms, we cringe purely from disgust. We should also be cringing because we give a damn about these people.
--Nicholas Ozment