Adam and Fenton Meiks are two ordinary Texas kids, living an ordinary life with their dad (Bill Paxton), who has raised them by himself after their mother died while giving birth to the youngest. Then one day, all pretence of ordinary escapes the family home forever when Dad wakes his sons in the middle of the night to tell them he had a vision. An angel revealed to him that Judgement Day was nigh, that demons were infiltrating Earth’s population and that the Meiks had been chosen to work as God’s hands. Using three “magical weapons” (an ax named Otis, a steel pipe and a pair of gloves!), they shall track down demons, destroy them and bury their corpses in the rose garden nearby…

Spooky, eh? The idea of a God who would send his servants out on vigilante murder sprees is intriguing (if possibly offensive to some), unfortunately I never got a sense of what the movie wanted to say; it doesn’t seem to know what to do with its premise. Bill Paxton (making his directorial debut) works at maintaining a dark and creepy atmosphere, and he gets decent performances from his cast, but his film never takes off. The murder scenes are kind of chilling, but Paxton never pushes them to their full potential. Most of the time, we’re tempted to say like Homer Simpson at Storytown Village, after the wolf’s half-assed blow at the piggies’ house: “That was good… but not great.” It gets repetitive, too, as Paxton’s character always follows the same routine: find demon, hit it behind the head with steel pipe, bring back to his shack, touch its skin gloves off to reveal its evil, destroy it with Otis the ax, bury it in the rose garden then repeat.

The film goes around in circles like this for a while, then it drops the ball completely as it tries to shake up the audience with ever more contrived plot twists. Am I the only one who’s fed up of how every other movie now has to attempt to pull the rug from under us? “Frailty” might be the worst victim of this trend, as it tries to pull not one but three or four oh-so-shocking third-act twists. Brent Hanley’s script borrows the structure of “The Usual Suspects”, with the story being told through long flash-backs as one of the grown-up brothers (Matthew McConaughey) talks to an FBI agent (Powers Boothe). “Frailty” also borrows a gimmick from “Unbreakable” (which was already borrowing it from “The Dead Zone”) which gives the protagonists the ability to see people’s sins when they touch them. If you’ve seen these movies, you can probably guess some of the switcheroos you’re in for. I don’t have anything against surprises per se, but those found in “Frailty” are rather predictable, as they’re all things we’ve seen before, and they undermine an already flawed film even more. “Frailty” ends up being not much better than your average straight-to-video B-movie.