| Overall Grade: |
C |
|
| Story: |
C- |
|
|
| Acting: |
C |
|
|
| Direction: |
D+ |
|
|
| Visuals: |
C |
|
|
SUCKS THE AIR OUT OF THE ROOM
by (movies profile)
Jun 26, 2008
31
of
44 people found this review helpful
This is “Fargo” without any of the wit, black humor, or intelligence, without any of the sexy violence: Family turns on itself for direly needed cash, setting loose the latent evil that has been festering below the surface for decades, only to implode, leaving a trail of corpses.
Major problem: I for one didn’t give a damn about any of the characters. These are snakes, folks, cold phony little bastards who need to be run over by a train ASAP. So what if their lives go down the drain? They didn’t have lives to begin with.
The movie chops up the time line, butchers continuity. Movies ain’t novels. They live in, are prisoners of, The Moment. Flashbacks destroy their momentum, their forward thrust, and have to be used very sparingly, as brief asides. But here, for no real good reason, other for artsy-fartsy self-conscious self-indulgence, the movie intrusively hops around time, changing POV, from character to character, instead of interweaving their lives with any semblance of skill. We do not need titles that flash on the screen proclaiming “Four days earlier.”
Too bad Marisa Tomei has been reduced to prancing around naked to get a role (nice bod, tho). A dissolute flabby old goat, Albert Finney stumbles around, mouth open as if to catch flies. Amy Ryan, so spot-on perfect in “Gone Baby Gone,” is a complete drag, a cut-out stock character, the disgruntled ex, her underutilization an indication of the director’s ineptitude. Philip Hoffman is the critics’ pet, condemned to the purgatory of minor movies such as this that the majority of Americans will never see.
Sidney Lumet must be in his second childhood. |
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