The serial killer thriller has been enjoying such a surge in momentum that even the genre’s worst offerings are capable of being swept up in the tide and given a new lease of life, and it wouldn’t be a stretch to name director Jonas Åkerlund’s 2009 dud Horsemen among them, despite an eye-catching premise.
Dennis Quaid stars as a grizzled and recently widowed detective, who finds his stomach turned when he’s tasked to investigate a string of murders that could best be described as unpleasant on the eye. Digging deeper, he begins to realize that the deaths are all biblical in nature, with each of them inspired by one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
That’s a neat hat on which to hang a brutal combination of police procedural and all-out assault on the senses, not to mention a curious one given that Michael Bay is listed as one of the producers, while the screenplay hails from Wonder Woman 1984, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse writer Dave Callaham.
And yet, Horsemen probably would have been better off being turned into glue, seeing as all it could rustle up on Rotten Tomatoes was a 20 percent critical score and a 25 percent audience approval rating, the latter of which comes from upwards of 10,000 votes, so we’re not exactly talking about a small sample size, either.
Being a serial killer thriller, though, Horsemen has set the all-round apathy to one side in order to claim another victim on streaming, with FlixPatrol harking back to the good book by unveiling the fairly wretched psychological pot-boiler as one of the 10 most-watched features on Starz in both the United Kingdom and United States.
Published: Feb 21, 2023 01:27 pm