WHEN you’ve got cute young tourists, an exotic locale (well, sort of: Mexico), ancient Mayan hoodoo and surly peasants with machetes, you expect a bit more than “The Ruins” gives you, which is: killer plants.
Four American spring-breakers (two girls, two guys, no brains) are lounging by the pool in a Mexican resort when a German guy tells them about these cool off-the-map Mayan ruins that he’s planning to visit.
So everyone tramps down a hidden path to find a pyramid guarded by a jabbering villager with a gun and a bow.
One of the turistas takes his picture, prompting him to go nuts with a pistol (this is never explained). Naturally, they all choose not to run back the way they came – but to scramble to the top of the pyramid and comfortably trap themselves. Atop the ruins, though, there’s a pit that may contain a working cellphone.
The movie runs quickly out of ideas. During the second half, the Americans have no plan to defeat the forces against them (their strategy is to wait for help). The movie is solely a series of gross-out episodes involving DIY surgery (one of the vacationers is in med school) and those murderous plants, which creep and smother and mimic and generally do everything but hum the score of “Little Shop of Horrors.”
There’s only so much scare value to ivy. (What’s next: “The Day the Algae Came”?)
And the movie doesn’t do anything with these viney bastards. There’s no back story, no satire, no allegory, no implications beyond what’s happening on the pyramid.
What dark thoughts may lurk inside your ficus? Were the weedy killers abused as cotyledons? We don’t know. The spookiness of the ancient setting has nothing to do with the plants anyway; we might as well be on a hilltop in Vermont.
When they’re not boring us with their bickering about who flirted with whom at the beach party, the victims can be relied upon to make themselves worse off. They’re no more interesting than the flora – so heroes and villains alike are stuck in a persistent vegetative state.
THE RUINS
Withers on the vine.
Running time: 91 minutes. Rated R (violence, disturbing images, nudity, profanity, sexuality). At the 84th Street, the Kips Bay, the Union Square, others.