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| DIRECTED BY |
| Joel Schumacher |
| STARRING |
| Kiefer Sutherland |
| Julia Roberts |
| Kevin Bacon |
| William Baldwin |
| Oliver Platt |
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A group of medical students who take it upon themselves to evaluate the nature of life and death is an interesting premise and it certainly was an original one back in 1990, too.
It�s fascinating to watch the actors in this film because of the success that they went on to achieve. None of them should be ashamed of their performances here, with the exception of William Baldwin. However, it�s not so much Baldwin�s fault as it is the writer�s. The character seems to have been written in simply for the purpose of having someone to hold that video camera during the flatline experiments; the little care that does go into the character is simply retracting from the rest of the film.
With �Flatliners,� �The Lost Boys,� and the more recent �Phone Booth,� it�s clear that Joel Schumacher knows how to utilize the acting talent of Kiefer Sutherland more than any other director does. Sutherland is his most compelling as a screen presence here, carrying a fun-to-watch misanthropic attitude around with him under his lanky overcoat.
The dreamlike death sequences within the students� minds, for me, just weren�t convincing and it seemed like Schumacher was going for a Lynchian visual style that he could never quite achieve. However, he makes up for a lot of those inadequacies with his masterful use of lighting, particularly the use of a blue tint throughout much of the denouement that gives the film an excellent atmosphere of dread.
Like most of Schumacher�s films, I didn�t much care for the moralistic message that it ultimately amounts to. Through all of the film�s confusions, it does manage to development some creepy implications concerning the afterlife, but by the end it�s the talented cast that manages to keep �Flatliners� from flatlining.
