Writer(s): Scott B. Smith, adapted from his own novel
Starring: Shawn Ashmore, Jena Malone, Jonathan Tucker, and Laura Ramsey
Take out the “I” in the title, and you have a pretty fitting description of this movie: it’s a shitty, sloppy, dirty mess. It features a cast of young, generalized caricatures running through the tired, unimaginative landscape of a trillion films before it, with the added misstep of firmly believing that computerized shrubbery attacking humans is anything but completely and utterly laughable. My wife and I had the misfortune of seeing this in the theater upon its first release; it was a terrible movie in 2008, and it’s every bit as much of a terrible movie now.
Stop me if you’ve heard this before: Four friends, both boyfriend/girlfriend sets, go to vacation in Mexico. There, they meet a German guy on vacation, who’s looking for his missing brother. Apparently, he disappeared while navigating some Mayan ruins that—surprise!—conveniently aren’t located on any map, and of course he talks the four Americans into joining him in the search. After all, what could go wrong?
Well things go wrong immediately. Right after arriving at said ruins, a group of Mayans completely surround them, and to show they mean business, kill a random character thrown in simply to serve as fodder. The remaining characters run to the top of a hill, where they discover an old tent belonging to the last group that climbed up there. Uh oh, what could have happened to them?
Eh…I’m just going to stop there with the synopsis, because I already feel like I’ve wasted too much time. All you need to know is that the main protagonist are “talking” vines. That’s right…it’s apparently not ignorant enough that weeds are a movie’s main villain, so they also get to talk. This communication is done via “flowers” that are attached to the vines; they function basically as tape recorders and parrots, able to “play back” sounds that they hear around them. If that sounds funny to you, that’s because it is—these scenes are so atrociously done that one can’t help but laugh. How this idea was greenlit is already above me; the fact that it played at thousands of theaters during the recession--a time, you will recall, that the movie industry was claiming that piracy was killing it, yet refused to alter its excessive budgets and overblown payrolls--is mindboggling.
Aside from this, it all ends up the way a vast majority of these movies do: the top-billed woman survives while everyone else ends up dead. The only thing this movie manages to do slightly well are the practical effects. No, I’m not talking about the terrible CGI vines crawling around everywhere and "talking"—I’m talking about the actual gore effects, which seem to be done using prosthetics. These scenes, though few and far between, are mildly effective, and could have been even moreso if they were contained in a film without such a ridiculous premise.
You probably already knew if this was a movie for you or not before you sat down to read this review, and I highly doubt this changed it for you. Hey, I won’t judge: we all like what we like. But be forewarned that, in order to truthfully enjoy The Ruins, you have to shut your mind completely off, be under the age of twelve, and have an incredibly high tolerance for stupidity and ignorance.
If you still want to watch it and don't fit that criteria, then go right ahead: I won’t judge.
RECAP: It’s an uninspired, formulaic “horror” movie with the addition of computer generated, “talking” vines for Christ’s sake—if that doesn’t set it up for failure right off the bat, I don’t know what will. There’s nary an ounce of imagination in this droll mess, with everything ending more or less the way you know it will. But it’s how you take the magical, talking weeds—played straight, and with the filmmakers’ earnest belief that such a thing is scary instead of one of the stupidest ideas ever committed to celluloid, and thus unintentionally hilarious—that will singlehandedly decide what you think of this movie. We already know where I stand on that.
RATING: 2/10
RECAP: It’s an uninspired, formulaic “horror” movie with the addition of computer generated, “talking” vines for Christ’s sake—if that doesn’t set it up for failure right off the bat, I don’t know what will. There’s nary an ounce of imagination in this droll mess, with everything ending more or less the way you know it will. But it’s how you take the magical, talking weeds—played straight, and with the filmmakers’ earnest belief that such a thing is scary instead of one of the stupidest ideas ever committed to celluloid, and thus unintentionally hilarious—that will singlehandedly decide what you think of this movie. We already know where I stand on that.
RATING: 2/10
RED-BAND (RESTRICTED) TRAILER
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