The Horsemen

One major plot development can either hook your audience or completely lose them. Sadly, the latter is the case with the horror thriller ‘Horsemen’ that starts out decent but quickly delves into convoluted territory with an unoriginal plot and incoherent script.

Aidan Breslin (Dennis Quaid) is a widowed detective with two children and is investigation a grisly series of murders that are based on the Biblical prophecy of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. As he collects enough clues to connect the dots, he realizes that there may be a shocking connection between him and the series of murders he’s investigating.

Horsemen starts off well. There’s a picturesque shot of the snow where the first murder is discovered. The first twenty minutes make it to be a serviceable cop thriller with large amounts of ripping off from ‘Se7en’ but still intriguing in its mystery. Just when you begin to warm up with the characters and the basic premise and its secrets, the movie takes a turn for the worse with a plot development that turns things around. Ziyi Zhang, the adopted daughter of one of the murdered victims, comes out and confesses that she is involved in the killings. From here on, the movie loses the audience with some of the worst jail sequences you will ever see.

One of the problems here is the accent of Ziyi Zhang herself. Though she tries her best, her attempt at English is bad to the point of incomprehensible dialogue during the interrogation sequences with Breslin. And it doesn’t help that the dialogue one hears are some of the most trite and standard cop and killer exchanges we’ve seen in countless other movies. What should have been the centre point of the film (like the sequences from Silence of the Lambs which it liberally copies) turn out to be shockingly inept as actors try hard to sound believable with the script they are working with.

The problems don’t stop here though. In fact, things get much worse. What was a standard and watchable detective murder mystery up to this point quickly devolves into a convoluted mess of a thriller with religious tones thrown in. New characters are brought in, implausible plot developments continue as the source of the murders quickly seem to be a clan that operates through a website. The filmmakers realize mid-movie that they’re running out of gas pretty quickly, so they decide to turn the movie into a torture porn t thriller in the vein of ‘Saw’ and ‘Hostel’ with elaborate sequences of grisly violence that are unnecessary in the context of the story. The film tries to redeem itself in the end by throwing a plot twist or two, but at this point the audience has been alienated to the point that they don’t care. The ending itself is not only anti-climactic, it hardly solves anything that the movie set up to this point.

Dennis Quaid is lifeless in his role as he sleepwalks through the normal busy detective lacking family time routine. Though he tries hard during the end sequences, the role itself is clichéd and doesn’t have any room for a good performance. Ziyi Zhang is commended for playing against her normal type of roles, but she takes her performances way overboard with over the top dialogue delivery and expressions.

It’s a pity that a potentially good concept is marred with extremely haphazard execution and plot that makes Horsemen impossible to recommend. The movie does the ultimate sin of alienating its audience with every single plot twist that it takes and ends up being one of the most disappointing horror films of the year.

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