A very good movie

I already saw this movie but, since it was a while back, I thought I might as well check it out again. First of all, after experimenting for about a decade with motion-capture with some rather mixed results (I wonder how he felt after James Cameron reached such a massive success with 'Avatar'), Robert Zemeckis was finally back with a good old live action feature and I was therefore really curious about the damned thing. On top of that, Roger Ebert really loved this flick when it was released so it did sound like a very interesting feature. Well, I have to admit that I enjoyed the damned thing even more the second time around. Sure, you might wonder if Zemeckis was the right director as the guy was behind such movies like 'Romancing the Stone', 'Back to the Future' and 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit' so I’m not so sure if he was really the best choice to handle such very dark material. However, it turned out to be such a strong story, even a fascinating one. In my opinion, it’s not often that you get so see such compelling portrayal of a massive alcoholic who happened to be a hero in spite of his totally reckless behavior. It also helped that Denzel Washington was just so damned impressive and gave one of his best performances. Eventually, the only thing was that the sub-plot involving Kelly Reilly was rather weak and it seemed pretty obvious that this character was added to the mix there only to make sure that the main character had someone to talk to. Anyway, to conclude, it is actually a really strong drama with a Denzel Washington on top of his game and it is still definitely worth a look, especially if you like the genre.