Review of Maggie (2015) by Kate H — 11 May 2017

I very, very very badly wanted to like this one. Arnold going serious, apparently for real, in a horror film! More of a horror drama really but whatever! I was pumped, I was ready to go, I wanted to see it at TIFF last year before they pulled it and...I was disappointed.

Really they just sort of wasted their lead actors. Arnold is getting up there. Eventually he's not going to be able to do the action hero stuff that he's known for. I liked him here. I bought him as a normal guy stuck in an horrific world and a terrible inevitability with regards to his daughter, Maggie. It's very understated, which is not something you usually associate with Arnold but it works here. Probably because despite the film basically revolving around him and Maggie, he doesn't have all that much material. The dialogue in this film is incredibly sparse but the images don't really make up for that lack of dialogue.

Maggie, played by Abigail Breslin, also performs really well here. She doesn't want to think about her impending death and tries as much to be normal as much as she knows that she can't. She just isn't given too much to work with in the same way that Arnold isn't given a lot of material either.

The movie as a result really becomes boring. There's not much happening and all this zombie stuff we have seen in some variety before - notably in the Walking Dead here since we seem to have gone for a more melodramatic and less gory version of that show. Great idea, great acting, but it just needed more work.