Seriously, its a female remake of Bourne series, complete with sequel bait ending. There is really only one or two reasons to see this movie, non of which are must see in theaters moments.
So basic rundown the movie: Angelina Jolie is a spy. Ignore the trailer, it gives you an idea of the kind of game the movie will play, but whether or not she is a spy isn't one of them. She is a spy. A mysterious man walks into her and Liev Schreibers office and offers a cryptic story about a Russian spy set up to kill the Russian president. He then says its Angelina. You also get Chiwetel Ejiofor as a cia agent.
spoilers
spoilers
spoilers
spoilers
spoilers
The movie is then is she or isn't she a Russian agent. And I am going to kind of dip into spoilers for this but if you want to know my opinion it's that you should rent this movie, not pay to see it.
So this movie is a spy movie. You have the cat and mouse sequences from Salt(Angelina's character) and the CIA. You have the big action assassination scene. You have the car chase on foot. You have the double cross. The triple cross. You even get a big show down in an underground lair. All of the spy cliches are here. The movie has a fairly clever set up where in about 20-30 minutes into the movie(I don't have an exact time as I wasn't allowed my cell phone, a plight I'll expand on at the end) the movie actually shifts gears into Manchurian candidate territory but pretends to be more bold. Which really sums up this movie, several times this movie pretends to be more bold, and as a careful observer of cinema it was all telegraphed in a style closely akin to looking at a scene of a crime and a movie highlighting which elements are clues. But some people might not see it coming and get caught off guard. But I don't think that is the case. Why? Well let me explain. Originally I thought this movie was treating it's audience with more respect than some movies by not flashing back and explaining everything Ocean's 11 style. Instead what we get is that things just happen and you are expected to connect the dots yourself. What I realized on a second thought process is that the movie might have actually expected you to know what was going on the whole time and so instead the reason it didn't might be because it expected you already knew what happened. That the writers thought it was already perfectly clear and so they didn't go out of their way to explain it. The reason I believe this is because the entirety of this movie is that it is a borne identity clone with Angelina instead of Matt. And without nearly as cool action or intelligence. Instead what we get is an action movie set up to be a series of films. The ending could have been smart and wrapped everything up(the film is only 90 minutes long, they could have spent another 15-20 minutes clearing the movie up) but what we get is Salt on the run. The thing that almost made this movie brave, that 20-30 minute mark moment is that Angelina actually IS the Russian spy that they talked about. It is then later revealed that she actually isn't anymore, but the film was exciting for about 20-30 minutes when there was actually the possibility that she was a Russian spy and this was going to be a movie about Russian Spy from her perspective. That would have been cool.
So there are only a few things I consider cool other than that portion of the movie are two actors. First is Chiwetel Ejiofor who is criminally underused here. He is forced to play a lackluster, under developed character that is more of a plot device than an actual character and gets thrown away about halfway through. And the only reason he works is because he can act and even on his worse days(which really is this movie) he still is a competent actor proving he knows what he's doing. On the otherside we get Liev Schreiber playing this movie perfectly for about 85 percent of the movie. the other 15 percent he's hamming it up chewing scenery but still. It's fun to watch him go to work. He is very likable here. I have to say that when it comes to Angelina her work here is great for most actresses but for her it's actually kind of mediocre. It's not bad. It's good. It's just not great and kind of over par.
The action is better than most but still a bit under the bar set by the Bourne series.
Overall I found this movie to be uninspired and took the easy way out of what could have been a great movie. It gets props for bringing the Russians back into style, now if only we could get a bunch of Nazi's back into the movies and we can stop having terrorists.
The movie gets a C+, if you can look past an ending clearly devised for a sequel I might even give a B-, but I couldn't so my grade is a C-.
A word for my experience. First off, When I arrive at 4(three hours early), and I am fourth person in line, and then by the time the we get let in I'm 34th, something is seriously wrong. I don't have a solution for this problem yet(other than handing out tickets to people, not to passes, as they arrive) or actually yelling at people who join in. Now this doesn't actually stop me from getting in, but I'm certain there are some nice people about halfway through the line that didn't get in because of these line cutters. Some that had been in line since five, which isn't really fair.
They were still handing out passes while the line was going even though the line was clearly larger than the number of people who would actually be getting in.
They had the worst security I've been in. firstly they had the full scale, locking up electronics left and right when they see them(of course skipping anything that doesn't look like it; I know this because I had my psp in a small wallet looking case and they didn't even bother looking in the case) and then once in the theater they were monitoring the crowd using night vision goggles. and overall I wouldn't be surprised if someone still managed to film it.
No comments:
Post a Comment