White Noise: The Light

Abe Dale (Nathan Fillion) takes his family to a diner for a celebratory meal and sees them gunned down by Henry Caine (Craig Fairbrass) - inept melodrama is not the best way to start your scary movie, The Descent does family massacre far more effectively and before the credits finish.

A boatload of pills, washed down with whiskey, later - and Abe is on his way to the afterlife himself. He dies, but is resucitated halfway through the tunnel and bright lights, and when he wakes up several days later, is able to see bright light from some people. He quickly works out that this means these people are soon to die, and saves them from their fate.

Thoroughly inept plotting later, we learn that the Devil (the actual Devil, boys and girls!) has plans for these souls and will not yield them so easily. And all the while Abe keeps seeing and hearing those terrible visions in TV static and electrical equipment. He saves his own nurse, Sherry Clarke (Battlestar Galactaca's Katee Sackhoff) - who simply LOVES Bride Of Frankenstein, "We belong dead!" barks Karloff from the screen. They have a perfunctory romance, with a cheap bottle of plonk and pool.

All this in a thoroughly derivative sequel, which does not require you to have watched the two-year-old Michael Keaton starrer. It takes the plot strings from Minority Report and Final Destination and does nothing especially memorable with them.

An utterly humourless movie, Fillion - fresh from the gloriously entertaining Serenity and Slither - cannot convince us as a grieving family man or as a potential "blue tights" superhero. The two plot elements of Minority Report - the desparate family man, and reading the future - are done so much better in Spielberg's film due to the concrete story and immutable rules, which hold water.

Director Patrick Lussier (Dracula 2001) fashions a dreary looking film, without any visual or storytelling flair. His detective work thread bores and confuses in equal measure.The inept Grim Reaper/Satanic story dribble fails to engage, and subsequent 666 plot revelations are uninvolving and positively ridiculous. And the finale takes silly and pointless threads into a laughably ludicrous, extended chase with thin air and static electricity.

White Noise - The Light is a movie which cheats its audience, by denying us human drama and a sense of getting to grips with the material. It also sets up its universe with a lack of invention or even concrete rules. There's only one decent scare, the rest are telegraphed much too far in advance by the dimwitted sound design to have an impact. You know the kind, where ambient noise is suddenly silent, and then *wham!* - a loud music sting and a high-contrast image of something suitably nasty. Yawn! You've seen this before. And without a point, who cares? Even the "spooky" credits were naff.