An average movie

I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this flick but since there was a decent cast involved, I thought I might as well check it out. To be honest, at first, I thought it would be another misguided and completely unnecessary American remake. Ok, it was still not really an improvement on the Dutch version and it was also rather annoying to see all these Dutch characters speaking in English but this version was actually slighty better than I expected. At least, they kept the real names of the protagonists but Peter R. de Vries, the guy who wrote the book which inspired this movie, still disapproved the end-result as it was not accurate enough with many of the historical facts. Still, I was quite intrigued by how these working-class guys managed to deliver one of the most famous kidnapping cases ever committed. Unfortunately, instead of developing these interesting real-life characters, we never got the chance to know them and, instead, they gave us some rather pathetic supposedly funny one-liners. Same thing with Freddy Heineken. Indeed, Anthony Hopkins was a great choice to play this part and he did whatever he could when he was on the screen but he was simply not given enough time to deliver anything really worthwhile. Anyway, to conclude, I still think it was a decent remake and I guess it is worth a look but there is no doubt that they could have deliver something so much better with this fascinating material. 

6/10