"Sometimes people just need to believe in miracles," goes a line in "The Reaping," but by the time you hear it, you've pretty much ditched that effort at least as far as this film is concerned. Starring two-time Academy Award winner Hilary Swank, "The Reaping" pretty much wastes her talents and those of people like Stephen Rea, who gives new meaning to the term "phoning in a performance."
Directed by Stephen Hopkins ("The Life and Death of Peter Sellers"), this is that familiar concoction of faith and science, whirred in a blender and looking sufficiently bubbly and attractive. The pleasure fades, however, after the first few sips. One of the big frustrations here is that the story promises so much more than it delivers, fizzing out to a confused and unsatisfying conclusion. Intentionally or not, all punches are pulled but the big, revelatory hit that comes some time during the fourth reel in the more successful works of the genre never makes the cut.
Swank plays Katherine Winter, a missionary turned miracle-buster after the harrowing deaths of her husband and small daughter in Sudan where as a family, they had been engaged in preaching and charitable works. Now the Omnipotent and all-supposed miracles linked to a higher being are her enemies and she fully devotes herself to exposing frauds and drawing up scientific explanations. So when Louisiana school teacher Doug (David Morrissey, most often associated with his role in "Basic Instinct 2") calls her in to investigate the terrible tragedies that has befallen his town of Haven, Katherine accepts with alacrity and flies down post-haste with her devout assistant Ben (Idris Elba).