Denouement

(Mostly) 1 Minute Movie Reviews

Posts Tagged thriller

Shutter Island

Feb 22

Posted by Mark in Movie Review | No Comments

офис обзавежданеIncredible drama by director Martin Scorsese about two U.S. Marshals (Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo) who travel to Shutter Island, home to a heavily guarded mental institution, to investigate the disappearance of one of its patients.  I was hooked on this thriller from the first note I heard in its haunting score which sets the chilling environment on this island full of crazy people.  Aided by the excellent Sir Ben Kingsley as the head psychiatrist, DiCaprio puts on an acting clinic for 138 minutes.  In fact, I can’t think of a single scene that DiCaprio wasn’t in, and I’m shocked he wasn’t nominated for an Academy Award.  While I understand the DiCaprio show isn’t for everyone, that can’t stop me from highly recommending this.

Note: While it’s irrelevant to me, I’ve read that faithful fans of the original Dennis Lehane novel (Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone) might be highly disappointed in many of Scorsese’s creative decisions, so I need to temper your expectations a bit.

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Surrogates

Feb 13

Posted by Mark in Movie Review | No Comments

In 2054, the vast majority of the human population will own and control a robotic surrogate to interact with the world while staying remote and safe at home.  With the first violent crime in years, two FBI agents (Bruce Willis and Radha Mitchell) are on the investigation.  Surrogates sets up some interesting “what if” questions about our own society that lives anonymously online and engages in virtual worlds such as Second Life and World of Warcraft.  At 89 minutes (with opening and closing credits), Willis, along with supporting actors Ving Rhames and James Cromwell, keep the fast-paced movie certainly watchable until it all comes crashing down at one of the most ridiculous and selfish endings I have ever seen.

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The International

Feb 13

Posted by Mark in Movie Review | No Comments

Released during the worst banking industry crisis in American history, The International tells the story of the IBBC, an international bank engaged in terrorism and arms dealing, and the Interpol agent (Clive Owen) and Manhattan Assistant DA (Naomi Watts) who team up to take it down.  My problem isn’t the overused clichés (evil bank run by a group of shadowy white men, constant scenery jumps from country to country), it’s that the movie is just overly dull.  Having said that, the middle of the movie randomly features one of the most preposterous and absurd shootouts I’ve ever seen.  For a moment I thought I accidentally hit my remote and popped in a different movie.  Recommended to avoid.

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Duplicity

Jan 1

Posted by Bashir in Movie Review | No Comments

Clive Owen and Julia Roberts star in this romantic caper flick about corporate espionage.  Duplicity aims for a slick, twisty narrative that pulls its audiences to the edges of their seats.  And it misses.  The philosophy behind the movie seems to have been “put another plot twist in there.”  The result is that one’s guard against “shocking revelation” never goes down, lobotomizing our ability to feel surprise.  The on-screen chemistry suffers as well, throttled as it is by the script’s eyebrow-cocking distrust.  Hard to follow.  Hard to believe.  Hard to like.  Skip it.

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Sherlock Holmes

Jan 1

Posted by Bashir in Movie Review | No Comments

Sherlock suffers from the delusion that if you squint hard enough, its titular literary character kinda-sorta resembles the Tony Stark of Scotland Yard.  The result is an impotently indecisive movie:  cowardly with its desperate overseasoning of the fiction with non-sequitur martial arts and love interests, but too talky and long (2.5 hours) to be proper popcorn.  I won’t praise Robert Downey Jr.’s quirky performance as Holmes because I’ve seen him (and Johnny Depp) play this part a million times already.  And everyone else is boring and forgettable.

The story is the expected hackwork involving secret societies bent on vague world domination.  Those looking for a clever mystery should flee.  Instead of proper clues, twists or solutions, Sherlock hides behind the lazy and arcane trivium straight out of 1960’s Batman.  That plant produces a little-known toxin, don’t you know?

Sherlock is not offensively bad.  But it is such a wasted opportunity that it is offensively average.

too saddled with weak, desperate attempts to “spice up” the fiction with irritatingly non-sequitur martial arts and love interests to be much good.

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Obsessed

Jan 1

Posted by Bashir in Movie Review | No Comments

Obsessed is ostensibly a “sexy thriller” in which a deranged office temp (Ali Larter) seeks to seduce Idris Elba away from his wife, Beyoncé Knowles. Poor acting and eye-rolling dialogue are to be expected in service of soap operatic beautiful-people-doing-ugly-things. (See Single White Female, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, The Crush). Even entering with those expectations and allowances, Obsessed is shockingly bad.

Obsessed should be the central text in a course study on the evils of focus-testing: a cautionary tale about a movie that was rewritten to death and, even in death, probably rewritten again. At some point, it was decided that Obsessed should be scrubbed of any moral ambiguity or turpitude, granting it the ignoble position of being Fatal Attraction to the church set. No one ever does anything really wrong, and it is boring, a fatal wound for a genre whose primary conceit is lip-biting voyeurism. No less troubling is the disjointed plot, which is haunted by the ghostly presence of prior scripts (“I bet this scene originally led to something”). Finally, it simply changes voice, evidently based on a last minute change of mind about whom the main character should be. The result is a guilty pleasure with no pleasure and no guilt; a corpse with its teeth, heart and brain forcibly removed, leaving only a gummy and pathetic tragedy.

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Inglourious Basterds (2009)

Aug 26

Posted by Bashir in Movie Review | No Comments

Quentin Tarantino never heard of a mash-up that he didn’t like.  This time he squeezes a western and some revenge-sploitation into a period film about Nazi-Occupied France.  And in Tarantino’s able hands, it works.  The result is unique, funny, engaging, vile, subtle and important. You will be forgiven if you skip IB because it features a handful of scenes of over-the-top mutilation.   It is a violent movie.

But otherwise, there is no excuse for missing Inglourious Basterds. It refines Tarantino’s most recent efforts, shattering the notion that “no one wants to see people sit around and talk” by providing scenes of “pure dialogue” that rivet and clutch.  It provides a unique and unabashed perspective on one of the most important periods in history.  It short, it breathes new life into the tired corpse of WWII movies, and then decapitates it.

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Hard Candy (2006)

Feb 24

Posted by Bashir in Movie Review | No Comments

Ellen Paige (Juno) stars in this thriller about an online flirtation between a teenage girl and an older man that turns into horrific psychological and physical torture.  Hard Candy is by no means easy to watch, but it whitens knuckles, contorts expectations and absolutely works.  Movie of the weekend–hell, movie of the month.

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Hard Candy (2006)

Oct 18

Posted by Ray in Movie Review | 1 Comment

I would characterize this movie as manipulative, vindictive, and excessive.  Which completely exhausts my vocabulary of words that end in “ive”.  Watching this movie was an interesting experience and I have to give credit to the originality of the idea and the characters.  But it makes less of a point than an impression, and most of the impression is based on torture, cover-your-eyes-and-hum-until-it-is-over torture.  A 14 year old girl conducts a 2 week online flirtation with a 32 year old man (or vice-versa), and then arranges a meeting with the man and pushes to go to his house.  In order to avoid spoilers on this one I’ll word the rest carefully.  Not everyone is as innocent as they seem.  The girl’s behavior is too complex to be believable.  The “revelation” at the end feels more like a dirty trick than a clever twist.  Still, this one will not soon be forgotten.

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