THE MOVIE

Lena Headey as Gina McVey in The Broken.

Horror/suspense movies really aren't my favourite, but being a reviewer, I'll give anything a spin once and being a fan of Lena Headey from Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles there were no complaints in checking out this movie. So what's The Broken about you ask? Well...

On a busy street in London, Gina, a successful radiologist, thinks she sees herself drive past in her own car. Stunned by this strange event, Gina follows the mystery woman up to her apartment. From here, events take an eerie turn for the worse which leads to a car accident. Soon Gina's awareness slides from solid reality into a world that will haunt more than just her nightmares as she attempts to unravel the mystery where the only clue is a broken mirror.

So this is meant to be some form of tense horror movie right? Well I didn't feel it, it didn't scare me, the tension that is built up, infrequently we may add, rarely amounts to anything. Acting across the board is pretty static, there's not much emotion or depth to the characters with the typically Lena Headey (300) and Richard Jenkins (The Visitor) in particular not reaching expectations we had for their performances.

Richard Jenkins looks into the broken mirror?

As for the storyline, I spotted the ending about half way into the movie, probably a little earlier, and it just plain out disappoints.

Perhaps I am totally missing the point of this movie, or perhaps it's just complete shit, but either way I didn't like it. It's slow, lacks any real frights or gore (except one scene), doesn't make sense, and doesn't give you any answers at the conclusion. The only saving grace is the solid performance from Lena Headey and some of the supporting cast. That's 90 minutes of my life I'll never get back...

VIDEO
While the movie is pretty crap in our books the same can't be said of the video transfer by Icon Films. The video is encoded using the AVC MPEG-4 codec at the films original aspect ratio of 2.35:1 and the bitrate is kept very high, almost always above 25Mbps and often reaching above 35Mbps according to out PS3 unit. The movie isn't the most vibrant or flashy we've ever seen, but has a washed out "horror movie" styled look in quite a few places. Black levels are handled very well for the most part although we did notice some black crush in places, and there were also some scenes that appeared a little softer then others leading to a somewhat inconsistent look at times.

Time for an urgent phone call!

AUDIO
There are two audio options on this disc, a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track (16-bit/48Khz) as well as a Dolby TrueHD 5.1 track. We flicked between the two tracks before settling on the DTS-HD Master Audio track due to a slightly higher bitrate and a slight personal preference for that format. The audio in this movie is quite heavily dialogue based with some haunting sounds to ramp up the tension ever so slightly. There is some use of the surround sound channels and the subwoofer gets put to use very occasional too.

There is only a single subtitle track on this disc - English Subtitles for the Hearing Impaired. We sampled this on moments throughout the movie and it was accurate to the on-screen dialogue and noises..

Looks like a bloody sore eye.

EXTRAS
Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately depending on your point of view, there are absolutely no extras on this disc besides some trailers at the discs startup for The Box and Paranormal Activity.

OVERALL
I'm not the biggest fan of horror movies, but this movie is just crap. Plain and simple. There are few frights, a patchy storyline and next to no gore. The only good thing about this disc is the solid transfer, but we struggle to even recommend this as a rental.

Review By: Dave Warner

THE MOVIE	4/10
THE VIDEO	8/10
THE AUDIO	7/10
THE EXTRAS	1/10
OVERALL	4.5/10