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Slow Paced Thriller

After his Daughter is murdered outside his home detective Thomas Craven goes on a hunt to find her killer, at first suspecting that he was the target and not her, it doesn’t take him long to figure out otherwise, and he begins to look into her life, her job and the people she was hanging out with.

The whole who is the target plot got really old, it was clear right away that she was the target and it had something to do with her job. You could easily figure out that she had something wrong and she didn’t want to tell her father. It was poorly executed and I was hoping that they would be a little more intelligent about this aspect. But like most films these days it was disappointing, before she even had time to explain, she began puking and bleeding and flipped out randomly and asked her father to take her to the hospital. Then she is shot out front of the house, and you know right away when they only yelled “Craven” who the target was. The name Craven was yelled so that we the audience would believe that someone was out to get detective Thomas Craven, but the mistake they made was having the daughter bleeding and puking and freaking out like something was horribly wrong. The smart way would have been to have her come like nothing was wrong, then have her get shot and then we find out about what she was involved in. But these filmmakers always assume their audiences are stupid, so they need to add little things that make it clearer. Give credit allow the audience to be surprised by one of these plots sometime, don’t just spell it all out, leave something’s up in the air.

Also the acting was good to a point. I am never really a fan of take matters into your own hands type characters, because they always seem to get out things that bail them out of certain death situations, and Thomas Craven is the same old same old resourceful cop that is featured in everyone of these modern day conspiracy theory films. Where I found Mel Gibson was the same as he always is, over the top I really liked Ray Winstone, a man we know little about, yet he seems to be trying to help out his mysterious ways, and as the film progresses we learn more about his methods and why he does what he does. His performance was spectacular because he was the one character that had the answers to the questions that were never answered throughout the film, and close to the end of the film we learn that he knew everything we wanted to know the whole time.

Even through all the questions and all the non answers we seemed to be receiving through out the film, the worst part of the film was the look about Northmoor, it was the clichéd eerie looking cliff nuclear energy plant, that had this fake air about it, why is it that all powerplant seem to run off in the ocean, and why do all these thrillers have a sequence where the badass guy is looking down about the city like he rules the world. Places like this don’t look that nice, it looked more like a hillside home built with mega security walls.


In the end it remains just your average run of the mill slow paced thriller with explosive bits of action that are off the handle, like shooting a guy in the head while driving at 50 or 60 miles an hour. There was supposed to be some hidden message deep inside that was supposed to make us think that we should stand up to things we don’t think are right, but the only thing I learned is that if I stand up to the wrong people they will kill me and get away with it, also that the government lies and supports illegal activities, like we all didn’t already know that. An attempt to be clever, fails. Saved by Mel Gibson’s decent return to acting and Ray Winstones mysterious portrayal as well as the revenge, one can surely relate to that.


6/10
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Added by kgbelliveau
14 years ago on 13 February 2010 23:01