• Genre: Science Fiction, Thriller
• MPAA Rating: R
• AMG Rating:
• Regional Coding: ABC
  Unspecified

Despite its occasional lapses into silly self-consciousness, Flatliners is one of the most intriguing and well-constructed supernatural thrillers of the 1990s. A group of brilliant medical students decide to literally play with life and death. They put themselves in suspended animation, electronically inducing a near-deathlike state and then pulling out of it at the last possible moment. Things get hairy when one of the students (Kiefer Sutherland) becomes obsessed with the notion of really dying, the better to experience the Afterlife before being revived--if he can be revived. In her first dramatic starring role (playing a sensitive young lady on a misguided guilt trip), Julia Roberts is very, very good--completely bereft of movie-star mannerisms. Audiences flocked to see Flatliners back in 1990 due to the highly publicized off-screen romance between Roberts and Sutherland. Oh, yes: Kevin Bacon and William Baldwin are in the picture, too. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Actors

Kiefer Sutherland, Julia Roberts, Kevin Bacon, William Baldwin, Oliver Platt, Kimberly Scott, Joshua Rudoy

Director

Joel Schumacher

Producer

Violence, Questionable for Children, Profanity

• Sound : DD5.1
• Language : Eng/Fre
• Subtitles : AR/BG/HR/Eng/FI/Fr

• Screen : WSE
• Dar : 2.35:1

Review

Taking on some very tough subject matter to translate cinematically, Flatliners is a benchmark film in the supernatural thriller genre. Putting a face to the phenomenon of the near-death experience, this grotesquely dark picture works reasonably well until it goes from the macabre to the contrived. While crucial to its plot structure, the moralistic bend Flatliners takes toward its ending almost single-handedly undermines the film as a whole. Set in the Windy City, fertile ground for the film's eerie life-and-death concepts, director Joel Schumacher and cinematographer Jan de Bont bathe the screen in rich, rippling green tones to give the film a spooky, ethereal effect. Kiefer Sutherland, Kevin Bacon, and Julia Roberts give sincerely paranoid performances in the lead roles and Oliver Platt and William Baldwin support them equally well. Schumacher can be commended for tackling the frontier of the afterlife with ardor and open-mindedness, but had he exercised more restraint and less pedantry, the picture would remain more effective than the spine-tingling imitators it spawned. ~ Mike DiBella, Rovi

• Release Date : July 03, 2007
• Length : 114 Minutes
• Dvdsides : 1
• Dvddiscs : 1
• Upc : 043396195073