IMDB Plot Synopsis: Forced to play a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse in the chaos of war, an elite Army bomb squad unit must come together in a city where everyone is a potential enemy and every object could be a deadly bomb.
- I am getting sick to death of the idea that camera shake equals gritty realism. Why is it that otherwise competent directors insist on this so frequently? What is the point? Why are they purposely trying to make their audiences sick to their stomachs? I know these people are capable of achieving the same sorts of tone in their films without having to resort to this sort of thing. It’s unacceptable. It’s dumb. Find yourself a steadicam and a decent camera operator. Jesus.
- All that aside, this was a pretty fantastic and ridiculously intense film, and not because I was nauseated the entire time. There is a lot of tense waiting around while the crew disarm bombs and it just makes you sick with anticipation because people get killed off pretty randomly in this, so you never know who is going to die or whether or not the right wires are going to be cut. Their luck has to run out at some point.
- Guy Pearce and Ralph Fiennes are both in this, but their combined screen time is probably less than seven minutes and each of them die within a couple of minutes of being introduced. Pearce notably dies five minutes into the film, which sets the bar for the arbitrariness of all future deaths in the movie. Perhaps arbitrary is not the right word, considering he was the chief bomb diffuser and it’s pretty effing unarbitrary to get killed in a situation like that.
- The three leads were excellent and Jeremy Renner, previously seen in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford as the guy who gets killed and dumped, naked, into a frozen river, was phenomenal. It’s a surprisingly small cast considering these guys are in the army, but these three really carry the film quite far and definitely don’t make you feel like it was stunt casting to get Pearce and Fiennes into the movie to add credibility.
- The sound design was freaking amazing. I’m usually not very good at picking up on these things because my auditory acuity is very poor, so I feel like the fact that I noticed says a lot about it.
- If you’re queasy about depictions of bodily harm, don’t go see this. For the most part you see very little blood because people are frequently shot at or blown up from a distance, but there’s an incredibly disturbing scene where they stumble upon a “body bomb” and it’s pretty horrific.
- The director, the writer, and the three leads were at our screening, so that was fun. So far I’m four for four on directors showing up at my screenings, which is sort of amazing considering I haven’t been to any galas.
Related posts: Hooked
, Green Zone
, Oscar Race 2010: Best Short Film, Live Action
, The Dungeon Masters
, Che
No comments yet.