EW review: 'Reaping' a bad movie

By Owen Gleiberman
Entertainment Weekly

(Entertainment Weekly) -- Katherine Winter, played by Hilary Swank in her dutiful-yuppie-good-listener mode, is a former minister, and now a professor, who travels the world defusing the lustrous credibility of miracles. Swank must know the feeling: She has won two Academy Awards, and she's still doing movies like "The Reaping."

Katherine is summoned to the sleepy Bible Belt backwater of Haven, Louisiana, and the first thing she confronts is a river of blood -- a pretty cool image, to be sure, though Katherine is certain there's a rational explanation for it.
To her, science can explain everything, and she hews to that belief (which is really a lack of Belief, you see), at one point delineating how the 10 biblical plagues were all natural phenomena. This woman could witness the parting of the Red Sea and think, without hesitation, that it should be reported to the Weather Channel.

In "The Reaping," every one of those biblical plagues appears, but they can't be accounted for by science, only by studio executives who theorize that an apocalyptic "religious" horror movie is the perfect way to tap into the evangelical market. (It sure beats the PG-rated piffle released by FoxFaith films.)

Having seen the error of her ways (science = bad!), our heroine finds the reverence to battle frogs, dead cows, locusts, and -- just to hedge the movie's bets -- a spooky blond girl who could be Satan's messenger. But no belief on earth can rescue Swank from a film that's a chain of disaster chintz masquerading as a sermon.

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News crom CNN.com

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The Reaping (2007)

The Reaping (2007)

Theatrical Release: 4/5/2007

Cast: Hilary Swank, AnnaSophia Robb, David Morrissey, Idris Elba, Stephen Rea

Director: Stephen Hopkins

The Reaping (2007)

Katherine Winter doesn’t believe in miracles--she believes in facts. A former minister, Katherine turned her back on the cloth after losing her young daughter and husband while doing missionary work in the Sudan, and now seeks answers through scientific investigation rather than prayer. As a university professor, she has become the foremost debunker of supposed miracles, called to sites all over the world to investigate weeping statues, wall stains resembling saints and palms that bleed. And so far, there is no divine mystery she hasn’t solved. But when small-town schoolteacher Doug Blackwell seeks her help with a series of bizarre occurrences the townspeople believe to be sent by God, Katherine and her partner Ben come to learn that sometimes miracles can be treacherous, and the line between faith and superstition is dangerously thin. Hidden among the woods and swamplands of Louisiana, Haven is a town where the rules of reason seem to have been rewritten. A child has died and the river has turned to blood, which is only the beginning of what appears to be a revisiting of the Biblical ten plagues upon the town. For the first time in her professional career, Katherine can’t explain these phenomena with science. The townspeople believe an enigmatic child named Loren McConnell has brought God’s wrath to their doorstep, but what they see as a harbinger of evil, Katherine sees as a lost child needing her help. The more she is drawn into the dark heart of the mystery, the more Katherine discovers her own role in a conspiracy that threatens to shroud the world in darkness.

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