"This girl is in trouble," Renée Zellweger's character declares in "Case 39," her first horror movie in 16 years. "I can feel it."
As can we all. Zellweger, at 41 not really someone we'd call "girl" anymore, appears in full career regression with this generic supernatural thriller. A fine actress with an Academy Award, you'd think she would be far removed from playing a social worker trying to figure out if this creepy kid she has saved from abusive parents was the one who needed saving.
Emily Jenkins (Zellweger) is a career case worker with child social services in Portland, Ore. -- someone who has learned the patience of one who endures daily cursing on the phone by parents whose kids have been identified by "the system" as in trouble. She is so committed to the work that she can't really maintain a relationship, even with a guy played by Bradley Cooper.
And she has developed instincts that she can call on when the system is about to let somebody down. Mike (Ian McShane) is a sympathetic cop who has, on occasion, watched a house where Emily suspects a child is endangered.
Lily (Jodelle Ferland) is such a child -- fearful, grades tumbling in school. And on meeting her frightening and angry parents (Kerry O'Malley, Callum Keith Rennie), alarm bells go off. Emily isn't shocked when Lily calls her at home and she has to dash across town to save the kid from religious fanatics stuffing her in the oven.
But after that rescue, Emily starts to see things that make her wonder just who or what this child is, and why people around her keep dying.
That break-down-the-door moment, quite early in "Pandorum" director Christian Alvart's thriller, is the high-water mark in a movie that spirals into cheap jolts that don't work (alarm clocks interrupting the silence, dogs leaping out of the shadows at the camera) and special effects that you can see on any given weekend, thanks to Hollywood's love of the loyal horror film audience.
Zellweger, forced to play a character who lurches from rational to absurdly credulous, loses credibility by the minute. Scene by scene she's fine, but there's nothing worse than a performance you don't believe because you sense the performer doesn't believe. And McShane, whose character also must intellectually turn on a dime, is even worse off.
