'Countdown' a waste of time

The one thing you can say about "Countdown" is that the title is entirely accurate. Almost from the moment it starts, you're checking your watch waiting for the closing credits to come up.

The film (not to be confused in any way with Robert Altman's 1967 "Mission to the Moon" opus of the same name) takes its title from an in-story app that predicts your exact time of death when downloaded, and then goes to work really hard to make sure it meets that deadline. Don't try to delete it, and don't try to change your fate.

It's like Waze with an attitude problem.

We're given a firsthand window into the app's evil workings at the outset when teens at a party drunkenly download it, with tragedy predictably ensuing. Ah, where would horror movies be without drunk teenagers unleashing forces man wasn't meant to know ...?

As written and directed by Justin Dec, "Countdown" is populated by a cast of familiar faces from television and headed up by Elizabeth Lail (star of the Lifetime series "You") as Quinn, a nurse who downloads the aforementioned app out of curiosity only to find she has less than two years remaining on this mortal coil. Even more inconvenient, the app follows her to a new device when she tries to get rid of her old phone, and no matter what she does it keeps buzzing with annoying push notifications letting her know the clock is still ticking.

"Countdown" could just as easily be called "Jump Scare: The Movie" for the many ways it wheels out that hoariest of scare tropes to keep the audience wound up. This is the kind of movie where suspension of disbelief is so battered that you're actively picking apart the internal logic as you watch. While you can appreciate the filmmakers' attempt to imbue some semblance of verisimilitude via a tortured Biblical backstory, gamely exposited by a "hip" priest played by P.J....