No sense in beating around the bush: it's safe to say that Red Lights is a complete flop of a film and the blame falls squarely on the shoulders of... well, everyone. Cillian Murphy and Sigourney Weaver play paranormal investigators basically. Naturally, they're skeptics of anything and everything but it's not long before goofy Robert De Niro strolls into town and flips the apparently booming paranormal scene in the east coast on its head.
The cast of Red Lights is, in a word, squandered. Entirely. Either the characters are underwritten or the performances are overwrought. The cinematography is needlessly hyperactive, cutting sometimes close to ten times during one or two lines of dialogue. There's a lot of talking, by the way, but it's nothing more than psychobabble or tedious scientific crap. The film relies far, far too heavily on jump scares and the music frequently betrays, rather than bolsters, the on-screen "action," which is a word I use with quite a bit of hesitation. The ending is the worst offender, though, startlingly contrived and pretentious. The audience I saw the film with couldn't stop laughing at some of the final serious moments. Looking back, I couldn't remember a single scene that I liked. Red Lights is in all respects a no-go and a masterful waste of time and talent.
Red Lights is playing in the non-competition Premiere category.
