Summary
A group of friends find themselves on a hostile dig site.
My Thoughts
At it’s center, “The Ruins” wants to be a horror movie, one that tries to set itself apart from others of this survival horror genre, but one that ultimately completely overreaches its ambitions, and takes just a few too many tropes from other, better films of this kind. It has some very solid ideas and a good setting, but unfortunately that's where the positives end; the execution is sloppy, and quite frankly amateurish. We follow a group of Americans who go on a vacation to Mexico, and, like any smart American traveling south of the border, they decide to leave the safety of their Beach resort hotel to venture into unknown hostile territory to look for a friend that went missing a while ago. They set their sites to an old ancient Indian ruin where the friend has last been rumored to be seen.
The plot is a bit on the generic side, and it suffers with too many conveniences in the script, such as why the Jeep that is left at the end, and how they actually get to the ruin. It all just feels forced and for the sake of the narrative, rather than have the characters find out organically what it is about these ruins that is so sinister. But instead once our characters arrive to the ruins, they are met by hostile locals who, without any explanation ever, chase the Americans up to the top of the ruins after they murder their local tour guide, who really had no point to be there, as they already established with the taxi driver (who drove them there) that this place terrifies the locals. It tries a tad too hard to be 'The Descent' by withholding information, but it's never paid off like the latter, moments that could have been genuinely creepy are stripped of their horror by weak writing and performances.
While the execution of these ideas are done poorly, the idea itself is actually quite good, and if the filmmakers actually had a competent script that could put them to use this movie could have seriously been a great atmospheric horror thriller, and much like this year's 'Midsommar' all the terror takes place in broad daylight, but unlike the former it does not work for 'The Ruins' benefit, it simply takes away any dread that could've been conjured. For a movie with ‘ruins’ in its title, our characters never actually go inside of the rock formation, other than once and with incredibly stupid motivation to do so, and after that they just sit on top of it where others have perished and left their belongings. I don't really consider this a full on horror movie for a couple reasons, first is that there is hardly any suspense, not even the clever jump scare, The Ruins tries to get it's scares from gore and violent images, and while some deaths are pretty neat, most of them are boring and without much craft or care. It feels like the filmmakers gave up on trying to make a coherent ending as well, nothing really happens for most of it's duration and any chance the characters try to formulate a connection with the audience it's lost by the wooden acting and first draft writing.
Overall there's really not much else to say about The Ruins, it tries to be a creepy creature feature but ultimately falls flat, and there's nothing creepy and there's no creatures. The menace they do find atop the rocks is a good one, but one that should have been executed by a more competent director and screenwriter, it really all just feels like a high budget SyFy channel production, with bad writing and underwhelming performances. There's no twists and turns or subverting of expectations, it's a straightforward, kind of boring survival film with not much to offer in terms of theme or insight. What could have been a solid film is tarnished by too many silly mistakes and not nearly enough suspense, and an even sillier rushed ending that will leave viewers scratching their heads 'The Ruins' just doesn't quite make the cut to be a good film.
I give The Ruins 2 stars out of 5.
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