Dead Man Down
May. 7th, 2013 11:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
redfiona99So I used my Cineworld card to see this.
Mostly I feel conflicted, and I think my friend L summed up the problem - "it's an arthouse filk about baking & Tupperware masquerading as an action film". And I really liked the arthouse flick parts, particularly the Tupperware scenes, and the action parts are terrifically filmed, but the merging of the two parts doesn't really work.
Basically if Noomi Rapace and Colin Farrell are on the screen together it is a good bit. They're the broken kind of adorable.
By the by, how loaded was this on the acting front, I counted one Oscar winner and one, possibly two nominees (if Isabelle Hupert hasn't been nominated it's one of those odd things).
The scene with the postbox was fantastic.
It was a little heavy-handed, especially the opening scene, but I forgive it. Because normally revenge films that want to go with 'no, revenge bad' cheat and still let the hero get their revenge, and the interesting this about this is that this one doesn't let the hero kill his bad guy, and, in many ways, his two greatest victories are not killing people. So it gets props for not cheating completely.
The other interesting thing is how this is very much the America of broken dreams and it's an outsider's view of the US (see also, oddly enough, The Scripts "For The First Time"). It seemed very New York as she is lived in, not New York as a tourist brochure. I liked the atmosphere a great deal.
Mostly I feel conflicted, and I think my friend L summed up the problem - "it's an arthouse filk about baking & Tupperware masquerading as an action film". And I really liked the arthouse flick parts, particularly the Tupperware scenes, and the action parts are terrifically filmed, but the merging of the two parts doesn't really work.
Basically if Noomi Rapace and Colin Farrell are on the screen together it is a good bit. They're the broken kind of adorable.
By the by, how loaded was this on the acting front, I counted one Oscar winner and one, possibly two nominees (if Isabelle Hupert hasn't been nominated it's one of those odd things).
The scene with the postbox was fantastic.
It was a little heavy-handed, especially the opening scene, but I forgive it. Because normally revenge films that want to go with 'no, revenge bad' cheat and still let the hero get their revenge, and the interesting this about this is that this one doesn't let the hero kill his bad guy, and, in many ways, his two greatest victories are not killing people. So it gets props for not cheating completely.
The other interesting thing is how this is very much the America of broken dreams and it's an outsider's view of the US (see also, oddly enough, The Scripts "For The First Time"). It seemed very New York as she is lived in, not New York as a tourist brochure. I liked the atmosphere a great deal.
