Case 39 (Paramount Vantage)
Worst Case Scenario
Renee Zellwegger has been on a downhill career path since her last hurrah in Chicago. Now she is on screen in a horror movie titled Case 39 and horror movies are usually the last stop on the career train wreck express. You go into the film hoping she will be so brilliant that the subject matter wont drag her down, but sadly it does. Renee might as well be acting in Saw VII for all the good this movie will do her.
In the film she plays a social worker named Emily Jenkins. She is so overworked that she has thirty-eight outstanding cases, and then her boss gives her case number thirty-nine. This one involves a young girl named Lilith (Jodelle Ferland) who lives with her mother and father (Kerry OMalley and Callum Keith Rennie).
It has been reported the young girl may have been physically or emotionally abused by her parents so Emily investigates. After a strange interview with the parents, she leaves their house thinking something is terribly wrong and it is. She hopes her child psychologist boyfriend Doug (Bradley Cooper) or her police detective friend Mike Barron (Ian McShane) can help her out with the situation. Little does she know she is putting both of them in harms way.
Zellwegger does a good job portraying Emily. She is especially good in the scenes where she is professing her sanity. In a much smaller role Cooper still makes an impression as a good guy whose life goes wrong because of his kindness. McShane always makes his presence known even if the role he has is barely more than a walk on.
As Lilith, Ferland manages to give life to a variety of facets of her personality. She can go from sweet to menacing in the blink of an eye. She is the core of the movie and she plays it to her benefit. The movie will not help Zellweggers career but it should get Ferland some good word of mouth.
The movie is rated R for profanity and violence.
Case 39 is the type of horror film that paints itself into a corner and has no where to go. So it just ends. There is no explanation for all that has preceded the ending. It has managed to keep your attention while you hope for some insight and then it is over and you have no way of explaining anything to yourself.
Rene Zellwegger had some great career momentum going after Chicago but each movie she did after that musical was a poor choice for her talent. Hopefully she can still find some way to climb out of the hole in which her career has fallen but it wont be by making B level horror flicks. Worst case scenario She continues to make one bad movie after another until the last nail in her career coffin has been hammered in.
I scored Case 39 a filed 5 out of 10.
