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[philosoraptor42]

Point Blank (2010)

So Fred Cavayé, the director of Pour Elle (Everything For Her), the film which was remade into "The Next Three Days" (starring Russell Crowe), has released a new film. Point Blank is very similar to Pour Elle. Both films involve a husband who will do anything for his wife. The difference is that while in Pour Elle it was a husband breaking his wife out of prison, in Point Blank it is a husband saving his wife from kidnappers.

The explanation of jail-breaking by an expert in Pour Elle made it very clear that there was moral ambiguity at play. The husband knew full well what he would have to become in order to succeed and we in the audience knew that it wasn't a good thing. Unlike in the remake where the facts of the case are left ambiguous to start, in the original Pour Elle the facts of the case were made clear from the very beginning. This meant that Pour Elle didn't have the same self-righteousness of The Next Three Days which seemed to argue "look see, you should always trust your wife to be honest even if she's a convicted murderer" (as well as that a popped coat button will make all the difference to a murder case *facepalm*).

The Russell Crowe remake seemed to imagine that the moral ambiguity should lie with whether the wife was guilty or not, meaning that once revealed as innocent, the audience could rest easy that everything was justified and Russell Crowe could be accepted as the hero we wanted him to be. The original "Pour Elle", however, showed that the moral ambiguity still remained even if the wife was innocent. Breaking someone wrongly convicted out of jail isn't a matter of "defending the innocent". You have to be utterly desperate to attempt it and you put many people at risk. There was something sick about the whole enterprise and that sickness is made very clear when a friend discovers the father with his son in an empty house, having sold all their belongings to fund their escape abroad. Though this darker element meant that the audience could never fully identify with the lead character, there's no doubt that it was conveyed effectively and seriously.

In Point Blank the tone is rather different. The new moral quandary for the protagonist is whether he should listen to the kidnappers or the police. It's all very well saying "call the police", but if the police rush in, his wife will die. There's a level of silliness in Point Blank which was not present in "Pour Elle" but it makes the movie a lot more fun and there are still definitely darker aspects of the plot all the same. A few necessary plot contrivances keep the pace and there's plenty to make clear that this is not the ultra-serious gritty movie that Pour Elle was.

Our protagonist in "Point Blank" is buddied up with a hardened criminal on the run from both the police and some unknown criminal element alike. He has ties with the kidnappers, but it becomes clear that something more is at play. The relationship between this criminal and our protagonist is interesting since while both are desperate men, the criminal is much more at home in the chaos.

Another important change between Pour Elle and Point Blank is that Point Blank is an action movie. Both films have a similar sort of adrenaline to them, since the struggle to break someone out of prison was far from uneventful. However, Point Blank involves a lot of chasing and running as the plot unfolds.

Point Blank is a crime thriller which is able to pull you in without having the protagonist seem comedically out of place (like "True Romance"), making the protagonist into James Bond (like "Taken" did), or having the protagonist bizarrely morph from one into the other in the final act (like "Collateral"). While Point Blank has its funny moments and is a lot of fun, one thing that the audience is always able to take seriously is that the protagonist is an ordinary person in extreme circumstances. He's not learning to be a hero, he's not finding out what kind of man he is, he's just doing what anyone might do when put in desperate circumstances. While the desperate husband presmise seems to be a common theme for Fred Cavayé's movies, it's clearly where his talents lie and he wouldn't be the first director to stick to similar themes in their movies.

A+

The Terminal (2004)

So with the release of "In Time" I thought I'd check out "The Terminal". It's pretty much the only film written by Andrew Niccol that I had not yet seen and my dad recommended it several months back. His other writing credits include The Truman Show (brilliant!) and he has also directed Gattaca (also brilliant!), S1m0ne (deeply flawed but interesting) and Lord of War (excellent and oddly underrated). Sadly it sounds like "In Time" is more of a flawed but interesting addition to Andrew Niccol's repetoire, so I'll probably wait til DVD to check that one out.

Admittedly Andrew Niccol's input into "The Terminal" is limited to "story", which means he had initial ideas but the end script wasn't really his work. Still there are other reasons to be interested. For one this is a Spielberg movie. That doesn't guarantee quality, but with movies like "Minority Report" and "Schindler's List" under his belt it's not a credit to be sneezed at. What's more the central premise of "The Terminal" is extremely loosely based on the real life story of Mehran Karimi Nasseri who was trapped in Paris airport.

The premise is that New York airport has a bizarre translator shortage so our protagonist (who it turns out can speak Russian) is barely able to work out what is going on. Meanwhile the audience understands full well that he is stuck in an airport because, during his flight, a military coup has managed to overthrow his government. Until a new government is set up, we are told, the visa that our protagonist applied for is invalid and the country to deport him to has yet to be recognised by the US government. Ooooh what a pickle.

It seems that the evil customs officer (erm...) has no choice (really?) but to persuade him to leave the airport illegally. If he tries to enter America illegally then he would either fail and could be taken to a prison or he would succeed and join the other illegal immigrants in America. Instead, he decides to stay in the airport and wait to be legitimately allowed to go home.

Catherine Zeta Jones' inclusion in the story is daft. It's hard enough buying into the idea that Tom Hanks is the only person from that country to take an international flight that day, without also having to accept that he could have a romantic relationship with a woman he randomly meets without her ever realising his situation.

It's remarkable how well the film is initially set up, but as the film goes on the romantic interest plays a bigger and bigger part, the officer in charge of customs becomes more and more cartoonishly evil, the plot becomes increasingly contrived, the number of characters builds with more of them becoming flimsy and insubstantial and I found myself increasingly uncertain as to why I should care. What's more the relationship between two characters seems to rather bizarrely shift from being barely able to talk to one another to a wedding inside the airport. That was probably the turning point from thinking this was good silly fun but with missed potential, to thinking it was stupid trash that was wasting my time. I think this could have been better and there were parts that were fun, but overall it was just plain average.

C-

Red Dust (2004)

Chiwetel Ejiofor is great. A Tom Hooper directed TV movie, like "Longford", which is way above ordinary made-for-television work. A cinema could show this without any embarassment and in fact it was shown at a film festival with high praise from Desmond Tutu.

The central premise is that, with Nelson Mandela now leading South Africa, there are Truth and Reconciliation Trials taking place across the country. The idea is that white people who committed crimes under the old regime can be pardoned so long as all the details are confessed. These figures can still be charged for anything they don't confess to.

Hilary Swank plays a lawyer returning to her birth place in South Africa in order to represent Chiwetel Ejiofor and contest an application for "truth and reconciliation" by a white man who tortured him. Things are complicated, however, by Chiwetel Ejoifor's plans for a political future since testimony that he gave up details under torture could severely undermine his aspirations.

Hilary Swank is okay, but Chiwetel Ejiofor and Jamie Bartlett (playing the local police officer applying for a pardon) are both fantastic in their roles. The film is emotionally powerful, well-directed with a tight script. Everything we now come to expect from the now Oscar-winnng director Tom Hooper.

A+