The Deaths of Ian Stone: Rating: 1.5 stars

The titular character finds himself moving through a series of lives, each different from the last, and each ending in his own horrible murder.

The Deaths of Ian Stone (2007)
2007 · R · Horror
Reviewed December 16, 2008

Somewhere between the nightmarishly grim world of Dark City and the sexy glitz of The Matrix lies The Deaths of Ian Stone, a movie that wants desperately to be taken seriously but, like most insignificant youngsters, simply doesn’t live up to its promise. Though it borrows liberally from both its thematic predecessors — and I do mean liberally; take a look at how the bad guys dress later on in the film — it never becomes anywhere near as memorable. The concept is interesting, and the scenes directly relating to Ian’s struggle to remember are well done, but the film is content to skim the surface of the concept and the characters, and the story never ventures beyond the predictable. The scares are rote, the characters dull, the bad guys all too obvious from the start. The ending, with its clichèd “love is stronger than fear” message, smacked so strongly of the worst of the Matrix trilogy’s Neo/Trinity that it became quite unwatchable. I would have done better to have rewatched Dark City than to have bothered wasting good Netflix queue space on this.