BEFORE: Liam Neeson carries over - I almost watched this one in Feb. during the "anti-love movie" chain, but I ran out of days. And since last week I watched "The Other Guys", here's "The Other Man".
Maybe Neeson gets some dialogue in this film...
THE PLOT: The story of a husband who suspects his wife of adultery, and sets out to track down the other man in her life.
AFTER: Again there is some time-jumping tonight, or non-linear storytelling. We see the last days of a marriage, with only some vague implications that the wife might have had an affair (due to the casual questions she asks him during dinner at a restaurant). Then we see Neeson's character after he gets confirmation of the affair (this learning happens off-camera) and sets out to track down his wife's secret lover.
Which isn't easy, since it involves guessing the password for a secret file on her computer, but as we know from Hollywood films, if you just take a minute and think about what you know about the person, you'll probably get it on the third or fourth try. There's no chance that her password was a random string of numbers and letters, after all. (I'll concede the point: the most common passwords tend to be things like "secret" and "password")
Once he's in the file, he uses detective skills to track the man down, and he (for some reason) befriends him. Since he's a rich and connected software designer, he has both the resources to track a man down and the spare time to be away from his office, playing chess for several days with his wife's lover in an Italian cafe.
It seems a little odd at first, he goes from a murderous rage to playing board games, from tantalizing the man with fake e-mails from his wife, to coming to terms with him and accepting what happened. But those ARE the stages of grief - though the movie does a fair amount of jumping around in time, we can see the main character go from anger to bargaining and ultimately, acceptance.
It takes a strong man (I assume) to confront his wife's lover, and logically it would take an even stronger man to forgive and accept his wife's lover. But maybe instead of looking for blame he decided to look inward and try and figure out whether he was responsible for what was missing in the marriage.
And about the time-jumping, a pet peeve of mine. Some very key information is left out due to the jumping around, and once it's revealed, it puts a different spin on everything. So there's a strong possibility that this was done to "trick" the audience, to re-apply sympathy to the main character at a time when our patience with him might be wearing thin.
Or, it was done to cover up a weak story, or a lack of character development. Man tracks down wife's lover, man confronts wife's lover. Taken in linear fashion, there's not a lot to it - it's almost like a tone poem of a film. There were probably just enough scenes of Neeson being angry to make a trailer to fool people into thinking this was an action film like "Taken".
Ultimately it's a very confusing film, and what's worse, it seems like it was made that way intentionally. Or it fell apart during the editing stage.
Also starring Laura Linney (last seen in "Absolute Power"), Antonio Banderas (last heard in "Shrek the Third").
RATING: 3 out of 10 fashion shows
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