Main cast: Chase Bennett (Sam), Brent Lydic (Josh), Morgan Obenreder (Isabelle), Ashley Doris (Claire), Anthony Ma (Danny), Dane Johnson (Sebastian), Norm Johnson (Fred), Jeffrey James Lippold (Travis), Tiffani Ann Mills (Karen), Christopher Neiman (Eugene), Kaitlyn McIvor (Kelly), Roxy Sowlaty (Bree), Ryan Merriman (Bryce), and Dina Meyer (Det Emma Hoskins)
Director: Rob Pallatina
Oh boy, Ryan Merriman is not aging well at all. What happened to him? He was so pretty in Final Destination 3. He now looks more like one’s balding accountant uncle than anything else. Maybe he deliberately made himself look this way as part of method acting… nah, I doubt it.
Basically, Fortune Cookie is about a bunch of Americans basically doing all the no-nos on the first day of Chinese New Year: wash their hair, break a glass, use a knife, etc. Unsurprisingly, their dinner at a Chinese restaurant ends with fortune cookies containing notes in Chinese, written on black paper (ooh, bad luck). Never mind that fortune cookies are a uniquely American thing and have no ties to Chinese superstitions whatsoever – the movie ties the bad luck missives in those cookies to the bad ends that befall these twits one by one, presumably because folks have committed no-nos that day.
The only characters whose names I can remember are Danny and Claire, and that’s only because they are Chinese and black respectively. The entire roster of characters are superficial and dull, with very little personality or memorable trait, and the cast all act like they would rather be anywhere than to keep filming the movie. Most of them are wooden, which doesn’t bode well for their ability to eventually break out of being trapped in B-grade films seen by only twenty unlucky people in the whole world.
Rob Pallatina also does an amateurish job in both directing and scripting the film. Scenes are sluggish and at any given moment, he has an annoying tendency to put in annoying flashbacks to dramatic moments that I have just seen less than five minutes ago. He writes in silly and pointless scenes to get the actresses to take off their tops, but somehow make those scenes so wooden and zombie-like that the half-naked actresses may as well be replaced by mannequins for all the sexiness and liveliness they exude. Is he holding back their lunch in order to make them finish filming ASAP in order to save money, or something? The cast looks really dead.
Oh, and the death scenes are boring. Even scenes that could have been unintentionally hilarious – such as these morons doing an emergency tracheotomy on one of them when they don’t have experience or knowledge to even get things halfway right – just end up dreary and uninteresting.
All in all, this is a most dreadfully boring movie. The combination of inept direction, lifeless script, and wooden cast only makes this one a complete waste of time, unless one really wants to experience what terminal boredom feels like.
