An exercise in joyless fatalism. It used to be I found these movies grimly cathartic -- to be reminded of all the ways in which I could be dying every day and yet wasn't -- but now their morbid infatuation with the characters' hopeless lot in life is too much to handle. I can no longer feel good about rooting for characters to die, even if they aren't real.
David R. Ellis uses the same skilled workmanlike craft he brought to Cellular and Snakes on a Plane. Many scenes create a palpable tension, even as their conclusions are preordained. That's certainly no easy feat, but I would prefer he get back to movies like those other ones, which at least showed a sense of humor that wasn't entirely founded in cruelty (this film technically has "jokes," but most of them involve asking us to laugh at the gory, splattered remains of the victims).
It's a shame, because there's hints of something better in here. An unexplored idea of paranoia, that surviving something horrible and traumatic changes you in a way that makes you infinitely more aware of your own impending death. That would be something worth delving into. At times the movie seems to be moving towards that, only to quickly pull away for the next Rube Goldberg-like death.
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