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Trailer for "The Reaping"

After winning her first Academy Award in the early 1930s, Katharine Hepburn followed it by playing a hillbilly girl in the justly forgotten Spitfire. Luise Rainer won two back-to-back Best Actress Oscars a few years later, followed by a half-dozen movies no one remembers and an early retirement.

Still, among performers with more than one Oscar on their mantle shelf, Hilary Swank seems particularly unable to leverage them into better roles. Even her campy supporting turn in Brian DePalma’s The Black Dahlia was an improvement over her performance as the sole name star of The Reaping, a religio-horror potboiler that borrows openly from The Wicker Man, The Omen and Lara Croft Tomb Raider. It would seem to be much more appropriate for an actress with the talent and clout of, say, Sarah Michelle Gellar. (Angelina Jolie would have been ideal, but they probably couldn’t afford her price.)

Swank plays Katherine Winter, an academic who has a flashy sideline debunking claims of miracles. We first see her in Chile, ferreting out the industrial pollution that is at the heart of a series of so-called miraculous healings.

It’s a business Katherine got into through of those pendulum swings of the spirit. She used to be a Christian missionary in Africa, where along with her husband and daughter she tried to bring salvation to the sweltering souls in Sudan. That she plies her new trade alone clues you in that this was not an adventure that ended well.

Along with her colleague Ben (Idris Elba), Katherine is persuaded to investigate a reclusive bayou town in Louisiana, where the water in the local river has turned into what looks an awful lot like blood.

It doesn’t take a degree in Bible studies to recognize this as the first of the ten plagues that struck Egypt in the Old Testament. And this is certainly a town that knows its Bible: You can’t walk for more than five yards without coming upon a sign with an inspirational text like “What are you waiting for? The Lord don’t have all day!” You can tell these people get a lot more use out of their Old Testaments than the New.

Sure enough, no sooner have Katherine and Ben donned their waders to get samples when frogs start falling from the sky. And flies infest their dinner. And a herd of cattle sickens. And…

Well, you get the idea. Given the mess that religious fanatics of varying stripes have made of the world today, I was hoping that The Reaping was going to stick to its initial theme of mystical debunking. But you and I both know that a movie like that would hardly bring in the masses necessary for a box-office success, so you won’t be surprised to hear that Katherine comes to rethink her position on the validity of God and his work in the world.

Why all of this is happening is not so easy to say. The townspeople have a theory that has to do with a devil child spawned by a Satanic cult. I will say only that The Reaping is the kind of movie where you have to sit back at the end and figure out whether the whole thing made any sense. I’m not at all persuaded that it did, even accepting the kind of nonsense that the movie wants you to take as a given.

Maybe I just didn’t pay enough attention to Stephen Rea’s role as a priest who periodically phones from Africa to fill Katherine and us in on what’s happening. The character’s name is Michael Costigan, but it may as well have been Father Plot Exposition. Nor is he the only example of bad, lazy writing in a movie that seems like it can barely be bothered to keep its plot propped up.

This might not matter as much if director Stephen Hopkins (Lost in Space, Nightmare on Elm Street 5) had only delivered where it counted, with big, computer-generated scenes of mass destruction. (It’s the only reason I’ve bothered to sit through the likes of War of the Worlds, Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow.) The Reaping starts out promisingly: The CGI guys outdid themselves with the river of bright red blood contrasted with plenty of green swamp vegetation. But after that they start to slack off big time. The rain of frogs are particularly skimpy, especially if you remember the amphibious deluge on LA that climaxed Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia a few years back. Now that was a frog storm!

I will admit to getting a few cheap laughs out of the movie, like when some of the locals are grasshoppered to death; I wasn’t aware the little suckers were venomous. Or an exchange of dialogue between a worried local mother and Katherine: “Have you come to kill my little girl?” “No!” “Why not?”

Horror fans eager for new fare that is not merely a recycled 1970s movie will have to wait until next week when the Korean import The Host opens locally. Promising as its premise is, The Reaping left me thinking that its title referred to nothing so much as the harvesting of ticket dollars from soon-to-be-disappointed viewers.