In short: Countdown (2019)

Saintly Quinn Harris (Elizabeth Lail) has just passed her nurse exam when she makes the mistake of downloading a mobile app called “Countdown”. It’s supposed to very exactly predict the moment when its user dies, with a red-numbered countdown doing its memento mori thing. Which would probably be good for a laugh for our heroine, if the thing wouldn’t actually work. It’s even doing more than just this, it also treats any evasion of its predicted moment of death as a breach of its terms and conditions, and supernaturally murders you itself. Quinn, it turns out, has only three days to live, and has to look forward to a couple of days of jump scary apparitions, the usual threatened family member (in this case: little sister) – you know the drill.

Because this is 2019, and our heroine doesn’t have troubles enough, there’s also a doctor (Peter Facinelli) heavily into sexual misconduct involved in the plot.

Of course, this guy will turn out to be rather practical for the movie’s finale, for what’s a script as lazy as the one for writer/director Justin Dec’s Countdown to do when its heroine needs to pass on a curse for the grand finale? Get her into an actual moral quandary? That would need a degree of thought and care that’s clearly beyond this one.

Adding to this kind of eye-rolling nonsense are lazy handwaving writing moves of the expected – of course the curse’s rules will not be used consistently throughout the movie – as well as the unexpected – pure chance is apparently the best way to introduce any character the script needs to Quinn’s life so it uses that move more than once – sort. Characterization is broad and without flair, trauma is a trope everybody suffers from, and the plotting just lazily makes check marks on the “Hollywood for Dummies” plot beat list. Acting and effects are just barely decent, while the direction is never outright bad.

Obviously – or bizarrely – I had a pretty great time watching this one. I’m not liking it ironically, and wasn’t loudly poking fun at it while watching (sitting alone in my living room) or anything terrible like that. Rather, I found myself genuinely enjoying Countdown’s complete disinterest in putting any thought whatsoever into anything it does, functioning as a cinematic dispenser for unflavoured tropes and cheap jump scares.