BEFORE: I'm not entirely sure this film fits here thematically, I'm taking a bit of a guess. I'm trying not to learn too much about the plot before I watch a film, but in the case of a film like "Total Recall", it was just unavoidable.
Linking from "The Final Cut", Jim Caviezel was also in "The Thin Red Line" with Woody Harrelson (last seen in "Friends With Benefits"). Never saw it.
THE PLOT: An aerospace engineer with a fateful secret embarks on an extraordinary journey of redemption by forever changing the lives of seven strangers.
AFTER: I think my instincts were good, this film does have a lot in common with last night's film, focusing on a person who's harboring a secret, and the way that he chooses to live his life while dealing with guilt and looking for redemption. But I was hesitant to watch something that also focuses on mortality, because my mother had another health scare, some kind of asthmatic attack, and too often I've found events in the real world mirroring those in the movies I watch, and vice versa.
My mom's heart is beating a bit too fast, and she needs to get it shocked to slow it down. But a character in this film has a condition where her heart is weak and slow, so thankfully that seems to be the opposite problem.
I was more than a little confused at the beginning of this film, and I think the culprit is (once again) non-linear storytelling. The first half-hour shows only glimpses of the methodology of the main character, and gradually we learn that he's out to help people in some unorthodox way. We don't learn the how and why of it all until much later, so I have to take issue with the intentional obliqueness of it all, it seems designed to confound while we all wait for it to sort itself out.
About 45 minutes in, I figured out where it was going. That's when the film gave the first nuggets of actual information. But while I penalize for the oblique time-jumping, I will credit the film for seeming to be completely predictable, and then still finding a way to surprise me at the end. I'm being very careful not to give away too much here, because I managed to watch it without learning too much in advance, and I think that's the right way to go here.
Let's just say that redemption comes through charity, and these are extreme acts of charity. I question the methods, and whether they are realistic, but everything here seems to be played for the maximum amount of drama, so the difficulty level is quite high, since things could easily drift into a place where things are either too dark or too cloyingly sweet.
I thought that hotel looked familiar, it's the same one seen in "Memento", another non-linear film. Nice touch.
NITPICK POINT: Is it OK for a grade-school chorus to be singing a song that mentions one-night stands?
Starring Will Smith (last seen in "Bad Boys II"), Rosario Dawson (last seen in "Unstoppable"), Michael Ealy (last seen in "Bad Company"), Barry Pepper (last seen in "True Grit"), with a cameo from Bill Smitrovich (last seen in "The Phantom").
RATING: 7 out of 10 ambulances
No comments:
Post a Comment