The Return (DVD, 2007)

What got into Sarah Michelle Geller?? Man, she either needed the money or she owed someone a serious favor and had to pay up doing the lead in this film. This movie will do NOTHING for her resume or career.

She should have stuck with slaying vampires. At least there the paycheck was steady and the stories were much better than this movie. OK, here we go...

In The Return, Gellar plays Joanna Mills, a successful traveling salesperson in a blue-collar industry. Despite having some sort of personal rule about not traveling to Texas, where she grew up, she decides to make her next sales pitch close to her former home. As a result, she begins having strange flashbacks, not all of which belong to her.

As she tries to discover the truth behind the memories, she unearths an unsolved murder mystery that grows WAY so slow. I grew bored of an all to predictable plot assembled from convenient moments and ideas from other movies that told the same story better using actors who were able to convey the frightening situation they were in much better than Gellar.

This film is being sold as a supernatural thriller, akin to Gellar’s other franchise The Grudge. The sales campaign is so effective that I thought The Return was also based on a Japanese horror film, like The Grudge. Don’t believe it. The “thriller” moments that exist are primarily created through artificial scares irrelevant to the story and out of place jumps in the music designed solely to make the audience jump in their seats. There is nothing
even remotely sublime at play here however.

Mostly The Return is just a murder mystery with a few supernatural elements that really have very little point to being there. Sure, theoretically Joanna wouldn’t even discover this mystery if it wasn’t for another character’s memories, but What little supernatural aspects there are to the story are there for plot convenience and an effort to confuse you a little. It doesn’t work.

Thanks to the lack of originality, anyone can guess what’s going on before the half-way point of the film fairly easily, leaving the movie’s detailed final explanation for those who either weren’t paying attention, haven’t seen enough of these near-formulized plots, or fell asleep. Considering the PG-13 rating which clearly states the targeted audience for the film, my bet is on the latter. The explanation, which works so hard to explain to us what has been going on all along, emphasizes the upernatural parts of the movie that were thrown in for convenience – since they don’t mean anything, they aren’t explained.

The good news is that The Return is set up in such a way that there is no real room for a sequel, making this a stand-alone film instead of an attempt at a new franchise. Unless, of course, someone stupid tosses enough money in the right direction. For my tastes, the only Return I’m looking forward to from Gellar is the return of Buffy after Gellar realizes it’s the only place she can get away with this kind of work and call it a career.

Scooby FUC*in' Doo was better than this !!! Don't buy unless you can get it for less than $5.00 on Ebay INCLUDING S&H and you are in love with Sarah Michelle Geller.

DTD