Suspended Animation Movie Review

Runtime: 114 minutes

Release Date: December 25, 2001

Rating: ?

Director: John D. Hancock

Suspended Animation is like two, two, two movies in one.

Tom is one of the more popular animators working for some type of Disney studio when he decides to take off on a winter trip with some friends. After hitting the woods on snowmobiles, they become separated, and Tom accidentally crashes his in the woods and goes for help. An older woman answers the door and tells him that help will be there soon before introducing him to his sister and later promising that his friends will easily see the crashed vehicle.

Not long after they take him in, they quickly show their darker sides. While one sister is a little on the sweeter side, the other is dark and deadly. They tie him to a chair and talk about all the things they plan to do to him, which naturally include eating him. Though he tries to distract them with promises of making a movie based on them and creating animated characters that resemble them, they finally get him into the basement and begin doing everything they promised.

While that sounds like an interesting movie in its own right, Suspended Animation becomes something entirely different. After being rescued from the basement, his white knights kill one sister and claim they shot the other but no body is ever found. Tom then goes back to his old life with plans to turn his adventures into a new movie. When a new woman suddenly arrives in his life, he realizes that she may have a connection to what happened to him in the past.

Have you ever watched a movie where you loved the first half and tried to keep yourself awake for the second half? That's exactly how I felt about Suspended Animation. The first half, or at least the part of the film that took place with the sisters in the cabin, held my attention and kept me entertained. I loved seeing the way he tried to play the two of them and even turn them against each other. It was also interesting to see the dynamic between the three characters.

Though it started off a little slow, it didn't take too long before Tom realized that the sisters weren't quite as sweet or as innocent as he originally thought. All three actors in those roles did a great job of making you want to know what happened next. By the time the second half of the movie kicked in, I wasn't as interested anymore.

The second half deals with Tom meeting a woman who shows no interest in him and then suddenly wants to be his new BFF or at least FWB. There's a lot of confusing stuff that happened in the middle, with new characters arriving, the new girl keeping secrets, and basically me trying to figure out what the heck was going on. By the time it finally ended, I really didn't care too much what happened to anyone, which is sad because the beginning was so great.

Suspended Animation had a strong opening and then kind of faded away.