A good movie

Ever since I saw 'Once Were Warriors' in the mid-90's, I had the greatest expectations for Lee Tamahori and I thought he would become a really great director. Unfortunately, even though this impressive debut managed to open the doors of Hollywood for him, his career has been rather disappointing ever since. Anyway, after almost 20 years, he was finally coming up with a very interesting project so I was really eager to check it out, even if it didn’t make many waves when it was released. Eventually, it was indeed a great story but, unfortunately, the movie was at best decent but nothing really great, I'm afraid. I mean, we shouldn't blame Dominic Cooper as the guy gave a really impressive double performance, managing to create two separate human beings. At the end of the day, the biggest mistake they made was to focus too much on Latif who was righteous but not really interesting when they should have focused more on Uday Hussein was clearly a depraved crazy and dangerous man. Or maybe they should have made sure that both characters were a little bit more balanced to create a more interesting dynamic. I also wonder how Ludivine Sagnier actually ended up in this movie as she was terribly miscast but the fact that her character was really poorly developed didn’t help either. Anyway, to conclude, even if the whole thing was flawed, I still it was a terrific story and it is definitely worth a look.

7/10