360 Reviews

I'm a huge fan of ' Cidade de Deus' so I was really eager to see Fernando Meirelles's last directing effort. On top of that,  there was an impressive international cast involved ( Rachel Weisz, Anthony Hopkins, Jude Law, Ben Foster, Jamel Debbouze and Moritz Bleibtreu) so it seemed to be a really promising feature. Eventually, even though the whole thing definitely had some potential, it turned out to be rather underwhelming.  Basically, it was once again one of these hyperlink features connecting some various characters and their own little stories. I mean, sure, the actors were good, I liked the international setting with many different countries and I don't how many different languages. I also liked the fact that all the nationalities displayed where cast by actors from the same country of their characters which is something actually rarely rare. Unfortunately, even though all those details were fine, none of those stories were actually really interesting and some of them honestly didn’t make much sense.  Let's take Ben Foster's story for example. The guy was apparently a sex offender,  obviously really messed up and, somehow, he managed to meet a very nice looking Brazilian girl in an airport. Apparently,  the makers would like us to even believe that she  would decide to take him to her room to have a good time. I mean,  seriously?!? It seemed really far-fetched and the fact that the guy, who was in jail for something like 6 years without any contact with a woman,  would reject her even if she was pretty much begging him to jump her was just seriously unbelievable. I mean, I don't blame Foster,  he is a fine actor and he gave everything he could but that was some really poor writing. The rest of the movie was pretty much switching between some other improbable settings and some other more believable but still underwhelming tales. To conclude,  it wasn't some complete garbage and I do believe they could have delivered something interesting out of this but the end-result was rather disappointing.