I feel like if we took a public poll on whether or not there was a new Ring movie released earlier in 2017, not a single soul would be able to say "yes". 2017 has certainly felt like a year that's just stretched onward into forever with its nonstop torrential downpouring of misery, but I doubt people even remember this thing came out, let alone that Rings came out not as long ago as they might think. For this newest entry of the Ring saga, the attention turns to Julia (Matilda Lutz), whose boyfriend, Holt Anthony (Alex Roe), has gone off to college and left her. They keep their relationship going via Skype chats, but it ain't easy doing the whole long distance song-and-dance.
One night, Julia gets a strange Skype call from a lady and also has trouble reaching Holt so she trudges off to his college campus and finds out Holt has become involved in an underground group of sorts run by Professor Gabriel Brown (Johnny Galecki), wherein students watch that Ring video that dooms whoever watches it to die in exactly seven days unless they make a copy of said video and share it with someone else. Julia ends up watching it but her version of the video is full of extra footage that confounds Brown. She and Holt are now off to go search for answers about this tape all while forces beyond their control tug at Julia relentlessly.
The hunt for revelations behind the girl in the Ring tape takes up the vast majority of the screentime of Rings to a baffling degree. It's all just so much boring exposition that has no real impact on the characters, it's like I'm getting lectured all about the backstory behind this franchise's main antagonist that nobody was curious about. So much time is spent on just going over the rote mythology of the Ring tape that excruciatingly long stretches of time go by in the story before even the barest attempts at weak jump scares occur, so I doubt Rings will even satisfy the most easily placated horror junkies.
When those scares do appear, they're pretty pathetic, with one conceptually cool piece of unsettling imagery (the image itself is rain going upside down and it gets botched in execution) occurring in the second of our two prologue sequences and that's about it. The rest gets repetitive really quickly, particularly in the overuse of bugs popping out of places you might not expect bugs to pop out of. Strangely, the supernatural horror elements take a backseat for much of the third act which ends up morphing into a knock-off of Don't Breathe. I know it'll sound shocking that a screenplay written in part by Akiva Goldsman might not deliver the goods but that is what has happened here.
Headlining the cast is Matilda Lutz and Alex Roe, both of whom just deliver flat generic performances under the direction of F. Javier Gutierrez, with Roe in particularly coming off as stiff numerous time in his line readings. I have no clue why the cast also contains Johnny Galecki, a guy who's the star of one of the biggest sitcoms of all-time that's still producing new episodes, so he's not hurting for cash. Making only his sixth appearance in a feature film since The Big Bang Theory started back in 2007, Galecki performance calls to mind the word "groggy". Dude always looks like he's about to take a nap no matter the context of the scene he's performing in. Taking a snooze like the one Galecki seems to desire would certainly be a more productive use of anyone's time than watching Rings.
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