Flatliners

"This is suspense to die from!...so exciting your heart might stop!" blares the critical quote from the cover for the promo copy of Flatliners. The unmentioned prerequisite, however, is that the viewer must be initially brain dead. Director Joel Schumacher (The Lost Boys, Cousins) takes an interesting premise and tries to ram it through relying solely on brat pack identification and set decoration. Kiefer Sutherland stars as Nelson, one of five medical students who engage in a grand experiment with death. Temporarily shutting down the heart ("flatlining"), four of the five students take increasingly longer trips to the other side, and then are high-voltage shocked and CPR'ed back to life, so that they can sip espresso and talk about their journeys moments later. Except for the opening sequence and a few similar scenes in the cadaver room, nothing whatsoever marks these "students" as med students. We know absolutely nothing about their goals, hopes, fears, desires, history, etc. We certainly don't know what areas of medicine any one of them specializes in, nor whether we're looking a "A" or "C" students (although we must presume the former). Kevin Bacon, Julia Roberts, William Baldwin (hunk Alec's brother), and Oliver Platt are on hand, along with Sutherland, merely to look nice, one presumes. The plot, when not taking the viewer through the same trumped-up oh-my-god-can-we-bring-him/her-back-it's-been-"X"-minutes! scenes offers a paltry "B" movie revenge scenario: kids the principals called bad names come back to haunt them in their post-mortem lives. Simply put, Flatliners is nihilist chic (the promo line for the video campaign is "share the dare with a friend") at its most disgusting, not to mention infantile. One can only hope that the film doesn't inspire any of the brat pack's fervent teenage admirers to try and emulate anything or anyone in this offensive movie. Not recommended. (R. Pitman)