Book of Days

Featuring great actors in this melodrama that lacks substance and credibility, this predictable story centers around loss and love. Jonah (Hayes) delivers a book with everyone's death date to a young man who recently losses his wife, played by Wil Wheaton, and discovers he can save people from dying by interfering with their lives but is subject to losing years off his own in the process. In between these events, Frankie falls in love with Danny and a co-worker discovers his plan of offering life insurance to people who are about to die and believes he is murdering them. Strong performances by both Wil Wheaton and Deborah Raffin who plays Danny's mother-lawyer. Maureen Flannigan and Issac Hayes do a decent job while Richard Grieco is laughable. This uneven movie is strained by the story and the situations with its characters and supporting cast. The one entity that helps this film be watchable is its lead actor who portrays Danny as someone to care about.

The acting is a little forced, and Wil Wheaton's character is a bit too whiney for my liking, but the story is intriguing enough to grab your attention for a couple of hours. This is a good "what would YOU do in this situation?" movie, enjoy it as such.

Wil Wheaton may have the cinematic record for shortest marriage. He gets married and as he gets into the car to leave for the honeymoon a car plows into the passenger side, killing his new bride and leaving him without a scratch.

His bride was a postulant nun who left the convent to marry Wheaton and that fact alone raises all kinds of theological implications. Why in fact was she taken?

Right after that, a mysterious messenger played by Isaac Hayes delivers an ancient text to Wheaton. It's a large book with names and dates, birth dates and death dates and some of them are listed for the near future.

What to do, if you're both a fresh grieving widower who questions why God didn't intervene and an insurance salesman given some impossible quotas to meet by a particularly nasty and smarmy boss played with relish by John C. Reilly. Now you know when folks are going to die, when it's their time, will you choose to intervene with the universal predestination?

Though Book of Days is a film with some intriguing questions raised it does have some limited production values and it will never be a classic. Still the players are all quite sincere in their work. Wil Wheaton has come a long way since playing model youth Wesley Crusher on Star Trek, The Next Generation.

Look also for good performances by Maureen Flannigan as the girl Wil probably should have married in the first place, Deborah Raffin as Wil's mother who's also a lawyer and Richard Grieco as an overly ambitious District Attorney.

Why Book of Days is not on the Christian circuit is beyond me. It's not great, but for the most part better than the product they come up with.

This movie was amazing! Danny was the kind of character that you feel such sympathy for! He goes through so much in this movie that you just want to hug him! Wil Wheaton did an excellent job...it was cool to see him in such a dramatic role. This movie was fascinating and definitely worth watching! The ending will totally surprise you. This movie did not disappoint in any way whatsoever! It made me cry more than once! I was riveted to the screen through the whole thing, which is rare for me, as I'm not the kind of person to watch just any movie. I have to have an interest in order for it to grab my attention, and this movie did, from the second I saw it while flipping through the channels. Wil Wheaton was great as Wesley in Star Trek: TNG, and he was great in this. Watch this movie!