Have you ever seen a movie that had all the ingredients to be great, and then...wasn’t? That’s basically how “Premonition,” the new film starring Sandra Bullock and Julian McMahon, plays out. “Premonition” is an interesting idea married with a solid cast that goes completely awry when executed.

The film begins with young and happy Linda (Bullock) and Jim (McMahon) Hanson becoming the owners of their first home together in generic suburbia. Linda worries that they can’t afford it, but Jim only smiles and gives her a look that tells her that everything will be alright.

Flash forward about a decade and Linda, now a mother of two, awakes to her daughters getting ready for school. Jim is on an overnight business trip and will be home later that day, Linda tells her youngest daughter. After dropping the girls off at school, Linda proceeds with her normal day, running, cleaning the house, and laundry, when she is interrupted by a knock at the door. The sheriff waiting at the other side of the door informs her that Jim was killed in a car accident the day before.

Linda breaks the news to her daughters and falls asleep on her couch that evening. When she wakes up the next morning, Linda is in her bed and Jim is standing in their kitchen. All is right with the world, and Linda realizes it was all a bad dream. Or was it?

(Spoiler alert!)

The rest of the film Linda spends jumping back and forth in time. It’s as if her week has been placed in a Boggle container and shaken before being set back down. One day Linda wakes up and Jim is alive, the next he is dead. Throughout the film it becomes clear that Jim and Linda’s marriage has become strained, but the audience is never given any real evidence as to why. When Linda discovers that Jim was planning on having an affair with a coworker, Linda debates whether or not she should try and save him from his untimely death. After one last night of passion before what Linda believes is the day Jim is scheduled to die, Linda faces a change of heart and decides she has to save him, because after everything, she still loves him.

But can she save Jim? Has he already died, or was his death simply a premonition, a future which can be altered?

“Premonition” is grounded with a solid premise; what would happen if suddenly we experienced our days out of order, or knew what the future held? Would we be able to change the outcome, or would our actions be in vain? The acting is solid from Bullock, who rarely flubs, and McMahon. The suspense is decent and the atmosphere is foreboding, so where does it all fall apart?

To begin with, scribe Bill Kelly fails to paint a complete picture. Throughout the film, pieces to the puzzle are left out, which would be fine if they were revealed as part of a master plan, as in “The Sixth Sense.” Unfortunately for the audience, Kelly seems as clueless as we are about the answers to our only half-heartedly burning questions. Plot points and story-lines are introduced without ever being fleshed out, and in the end we are left with no solid answers and only hints of a resolution. Perhaps Kelly was attempting to be clever or obscure, but the film comes off as incomplete.

Director Mennan Yapo doesn’t help the film with his silly attempts at symbolism. It’s as if he isn’t exactly sure what symbolism is all about, but he’s seen it done in films before and decided, “I guess that’s just what you do in movies.” Time and again, Yapo presents his viewers with images that, at the surface level, vaguely reference what is going on in the rest of the film, but he never fully follows through, a theme all too common in “Premonition.”

It’s disappointing that an idea so promising was placed into the wrong hands and so poorly executed. Unless you get some kind of pleasure out of bad movies, “Premonition” is one to avoid.

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