philosoraptor42

The Devil's Double (2011)

The story of the double for Saddam Hussein's son, Uday Hussein. Both the parts of Uday and his double are played by Dominic Cooper.

Dominic Cooper is becoming quite a well-established actor. I first saw him in the movie of "The History Boys". (The movie wasn't great but there was nothing wrong with his performance.) He played Peter Sarsgaard's partner in crime in "An Education" (fantastic film!), he played the younger version of Tony Stark's father in "Captain America" (meh!), more recently he was in "My Week With Marilyn" (haven't seen it yet) and he's scheduled to be in the upcoming "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter".

Dominic Cooper doesn't give the impression here that he can really handle the two personas he is meant to be playing, but I note that nonetheless he does manage to keep me invested in the film almost right to the very end. I think it is fair to put the blame with director Lee Tamahori, whose previous credits include the Bond movie "Die Another Day" and "xXx:The Next Level".

I think that criticism of Ludivine Sagnier has been similarly unfair. Certainly she has been cast in the role because she is extremely pretty, but in previous films such as "Moliere" and "8 Women" I think it's been made fairly clear that she is more than just a pretty face (though she was similarly underused in the Vincent Cassell movie "Mesrine"). For what appears to be a first time English-speaking role I thought she did pretty well and once again, I'd be rather more inclined to blame the director.

How about the script? Well there's a playfulness to the events, there are some moments which work very well and Uday is set up as a cruel rapist and monster. Certainly the order of events and the central performance move our emotions in the right way, even if the identity of the lead actor's two parts is not managed quite as well as it could be.

All this being said, by the end of the movie Uday's double appears to have far too much freedom. I am desperate to reveal the ending and would be inclined to justify this by saying "well that's what happened" only that would be untrue, which leads me to perhaps the biggest problem with this film. Things get out of hand towards the end and don't seem to have the logical flow they ought to. This is explained when we hear that the writer of the original account, the man who claims to have been Uday's double, is widely believed to have made the whole thing up. Apparently he's well known for providing outrageous accounts of things he is supposed to have done. Much is impossible to prove, much is hugely implausible and some of it is as close to demonstrated false as makes no difference.

Essentially this is probably better off being compared to "Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind" (about Chuck Barris' claims to have worked as an undercover hitman in between creating TV quiz shows like "The Dating Game" - the US version of "Blind Date"). On the one hand, the playfulness of "The Devil's Double" suggests they might have realised that what they were portraying wasn't really true. However, it's not completely obvious and the movie also seems to expect us to be shocked by what may be a completely fabricated account of Uday Hussain. On the other hand, "Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind" was vastly more believeable (which is saying something).

So um, with this in mind, written below there's essentially the spoiler of the ending. The bit of the movie which made me go "ZOMG this cannot possibly be true" (and also had me thinking that if it WAS true it could have been portrayed a great deal better).

This is not a good film. It's got some fun elements, but overall it doesn't know what it's doing. While it could have been done better, Dominic Cooper's performance as Uday and Latif (Uday's double) is pretty cool and he clearly gets to have a lot of fun with Uday's super-evil character. Still, while being based on complete lies doesn't have to ruin a film, but in this case I think it does.

D-

So, I don't normally do this but...
*COMPLETE SPOILER FOR THE ENDING OF "THE DEVIL'S DOUBLE" SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS*
Uday's double, called Latif, ends up having sex with Uday's main girl (Ludivine Sagnier's character), she falls in love with him and they run away together. Not quickly and subtly though. No, first Latif confonts Uday at his birthday party (where Uday is demanding everyone at the party asides from himself strip off their clothes) and this leads to a gun battle (WTF?). After Latif and Ludivine Sagnier's character run away it becomes clear that staying hidden is going to be difficult. Uday even seems to know the number for the room they are staying at. It turns out that Ludivine Sagnier has been letting Uday know where they are because she fears for her daughter back in Iraq and is secretly making a deal to return to Uday. (This feels similarly daft in the movie.) Latif disappears on his own without her. In the final scene Uday is encouraging a schoolgirl to get into the car with him (and from previous familiarity with his character, we know he's going to take this girl away and rape her) and Latif turns up out of nowhere with a gun and aims it at Uday. Not knowing how horrible Uday is, the girl in the car tries to push the gun down away from Uday, but only manages to ensure that the bullets go straight into Uday's groin. A fitting end for this monstrous figure.
*SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS. COMPLETE SPOILER FOR THE ENDING OF "THE DEVIL'S DOUBLE" ABOVE!*

The Whistleblower (2010)

This is more evidence, if we needed any more, that Rachel Weisz is an absolutely fantastic actress. The first half of this film had me gripped. The second half of this movie had me thinking it was alright. And the final ending of this movie had me deeply disappointed. However, throughout the film Rachel Weisz is the one thing keeping me invested in the story, right up to the end where it ceases to work.

This film is based on a very real scandal in the UN that I had absolutely no knowledge of whatsoever. Rachel Weisz plays a policewoman who is having trouble getting transferred to a police department near to where her ex-partner and her children are currently living. Her boss suggests that she can make quite a bit of money working for the UN in Bosnia and that this would help her make the move and get herself set up. However, after she attracts the attention and praise of authorities working in Bosnia by getting justice for an Bosnian woman suffering from domestic abuse, she is given a much more long-term position and the opportunity to make a real difference. It is in this new role that she starts to uncover a scandal on a colossal scale.

I'm sorry to take away from the surprise, but I cannot fail to mention in my review that this film is about sex trafficking and, what with all this talk of "massive scandals" it will be pretty clear that the UN turns out to be complicit in that sex trafficking. Highly complicit. And perhaps I'm naive, but I was pretty shocked. Rachel Weisz makes sure that we can fully empathise with the shock of a woman uncovering the evidence behind the activities occurring amongst policemen working with the UN in Bosnia. She has a no nonsense approach to the situation and she knows what her fellow officers might be capable of, but what she is unprepared for is the way the system seems to work against her as she tries to protect the victims and bring the wrongdoers to justice.

In the second half, the momentum of the plot goes a bit haywire. The filmmakers also seem to lose faith in how much Rachel Weisz' perspective alone can keep us sufficiently shocked, so in the second half we get some scenes showing the trafficked girls with wholly characterless evil Bosnian traffickers moving the girls around and shouting at them. It's still shocking, sure, but it feels rather more Hollywood in style. It's a clear sign that the film's quality is going downhill at this stage.

In the final act of the movie there's a weird sort-of-doublecross-only-is-it-really thing going on. It's a rather cheesy way to end a film that deals with such horrific real life events. Unlike in "Fair Game" (which I also didn't like) the final scenes of our main character on the telly still show Rachel Weisz rather than the real life figure and at this stage I was having a tough time believing in Rachel Weisz predicament anymore. It was clear that the film was trying to tie things into a neat little bow to finish off the show, but it wasn't at all clear how Rachel Weisz was going to convince anyone of her shocking story. The film seemed to want us to think we had a happy ending at the end, but we had no indication that the sex trafficking in Bosnia had ended, so how were we supposed to believe that the story was over? Perhaps with a real-life figure in the interviews we could believe that the struggle was ongoing, but with Rachel Weisz' character seemingly in the same weak position trying to convince people of her story, the film seemed to feel a lot happier about the situation than I did as an audience-member.

Like I said before, you can probably guess the basic gist of the scandal. However, for more details check out the wikipedia page on Kathryn Bokovac. This is a story that lots of people should hear and it's sad that the second half of the movie messed up so badly that I cannot really recommend it.

D+

Mystic River (2003)

In the run up to the Oscars, this film served to clear up for me just how worthless the Oscars actually are. Somehow Sean Penn and Tim Robbins won Oscars for this. I have absolutely no idea how. Marcia Gay Harden was also nominated and I could understand her winning an Oscar (she lost to Renee Zellweger), but not Sean Penn and Tim Robbins.

The film begins with three boys messing around in the street together and deciding to write their names in some fresh cement. An odd figure, seemingly claiming to be a plain clothes police officer, insists that one of the boys gets into the car with him so he can take the boy home. He's not a police officer and you can see where this is going. The boy escapes from the place he's taken and abused and grows up to a timid disturbed figure played by Tim Robbins. His two friends grow up to be Sean Penn and Kevin Bacon. I found it impossible to tell which of the boys was played by which of the adult actors, because one of the boys is blonde (the one with the cap becomes Tim Robbins):

Whereas neither Sean Penn nor Kevin Bacon is blonde:

The film never really had me caring much for any of the characters. It might have been possible to care about Tim Robbins character (what with the childhood abuse and all) except that it seems likely that he is the murderer.

This is essentially a whodunnit film, with the victim being Sean Penn's daughter. The problem is that while the killer is being discovered, there isn't really one central protagonist we are following. Kevin Bacon, being one of the children at the beginning, is not really distant enough for us to follow it through his eyes. In any case, he isn't made central enough to be a central protagonist. Lawrence Fishburne makes his mark, but it seems pretty clear that his part is only written to compliment Kevin Bacon's role in the story, so while he gives a bit of balance to the investigation (being more distanced from the people under investigation), he isn't a central protagonist either.

Sean Penn's character might be the central protagonist; after all, it's his daughter that dies. However, with him having his own hired thugs in the neighbourhood, he would most certainly be an anti-hero and he's regularly portrayed as actively getting in the way of Kevin Bacon's investigation. Another issue I found was that, if he is supposed to have hired thugs, doesn't that make it likely that he is involved in some kind of illegal activity? Why does the owner of a cornershop (which appears to be his job), have hired thugs and yes-men?

The final solution to the whodunnit element to the movie I felt was a bit of a cop-out. Based on the set-up at the beginning, it wasn't obvious how we reach that conclusion and as a result the solution felt a bit contrived.

I still don't like Sean Penn as an actor and I found his performance here pretty unconvincing. I wasn't really terribly interested in following these characters in general and the whole film dragged. The style reminded me somewhat of a later Clint Eastwood-directed movie "Changeling" which also had a child abduction element to the storyline and a shocking whodunnit element to the storyline. Perhaps being based closely on real life helped "Changeling" (though goodness knows that the real life events were hard to believe), certainly having the story from the perspective of a single character (played by Angelina Jolie) helped it, and while the ending does eventually tie up quite nicely right at the end of "Mystic River", the journey we take to get there didn't feel anything like as worth my while.

D-

Colombiana (2011)

First off, I have to say that the action scenes in this movie are fantastic. The intro introduces us to the central protagonist Cataleya as a young girl and, without the same neck-snapping skills, she ends up kicking ass in ways that "Hanna" could only have dreamed of. This girl truly knows how to evade capture and does so in much more interesting way than simply running down endless corridors to tunes from The Chemical Brothers. Even as a young girl Cataleya is a genuine badass.

The last film I saw from this director was "Transporter 3" which was actually pretty good, but if you've seen it you may have an impression of what this will be like. The director, with the very action-y name of "Olivier Megaton", really knows how to make an exciting action sequence. Cataleya is set up very well as our central character and her relationships with her uncle and the detective persuing her are both also set up very well. What is not done so well (and this was the weakness in Transporter 3 too) is the central romance. Michael Vartan (who some may recognise as Sydney Bristow's CIA handler in "Alias") does not give a terribly emotive performance, but the scenes between him and Zoe Saldana are a bit pants anyway.

I felt there was a similar feel in this movie to certain elements of Leon. There's a girl whose parents are killed who wants to become a professional killer in response, there's some pretty massive destruction taking place in an appartment block at one stage and there's climactic explosions towards the end. It would be extremely unfair to claim that this was in any way a remake of Leon, but I felt that there were plenty of points in the film which reminded me of that favourite from my late teens.

The central romance is relatively central to the plot and the plot is pretty simple, so that's unfortunate. Still, this film is really good fun, a bit of a wild wide and it has a very satisfying narrative arc. I am very surprised that I haven't heard any praise for this film, since if you want an exciting action movie for a comfortable night-in with popcorn, this is the perfect rental for you.

B-