| Overall Grade: |
D |
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| Story: |
C- |
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| Acting: |
B- |
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| Direction: |
C |
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| Visuals: |
B+ |
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Spielberg's overstuffed turkey
by clevelandoise (movies profile)
Dec 1, 2007
142
of
226 people found this review helpful
I could barely sit through it, but I was on a date, so I endured.
Where do I start? Is this Steve Spielberg's "Dirty Half Dozen?" He is all over the cinematic map, landing nowhere convincingly. There are so many self-referential filmic touches, as "Casabalnca", "The Conversation", and almost any spy movie you can think of are paraded before us. Am I the only one who noticed Spielberg included a reference to his own "Schindler's List" where he puts the little Arab girl running back to her Paris apartment in a red sweater against the greyish scenery, relating to the little girl in a red coat in the former film? Like he needed to remind us.
As usual, the director loves, loves, his explosions. The violence is extensive, but there's more. Toward the end, Spielberg intercuts sex and violence so jarringly that it approached obsecnity in my mind. Considering how neutered his previous films have been on matters sexual, what does it say that his first serious attempt to put sexuality on the screen (well actually the second, since an earlier scene in the movie is quite deliciously filmed) is so gruesome? With the added phallic touch of the aircraft, and the images of terrorists bursting in juxtaposed with our protagonist penetrating his wife, and not at all deliciously this 2nd time, he is either consciously insulting his audience or unconsciously laying bare some serious hangups. Sorry say, the ever boyinsh director can't pull this off.
All in all, a manipultive film. Go rent "Walk on Water." |
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