The Disappearance of Alice Creed

First Hit: An interesting story with strong acting but minor components missing kept it from being great.

There are only three actors in this film. Danny (played by Martin Compston) who is the younger of the two kidnappers. Vic (played by Eddie Marsan) the other kidnapper and appears to be person who is in-charge and is the driving energy of their abduction of Alice Creed (played by Gemma Arterton).

The film begins with the two men systematically and without dialogue stripping out a room in a building somewhere in England and putting in soundproofing, locks, and covering the windows with plywood. The only thing in the bedroom is wooden bed with metal loops for attaching handcuffs and rope cinches for tying feet.

After setting up the bedroom they strip out the living room and kitchen with the bare essentials and leave. Immediately they steal a van, hijack Alice, and bring her to the bedroom where they strip her clothes off, handcuff and tie her to the bed. Working efficiently, they re-cloth Alice, gag her with a ball-in-mouth muzzle and put a hood over her head. Vic and Danny are have masks on so they cannot be seen and then finally reassure her that she will not be harmed.

As the story unfolds, the twists in their relationships begin to reveal cracks in Danny and Vic’s plan to obtain a lot of money for the return of Alice to her father. The aspects of the film that made it a bit unreal were the lack of any other outside noises, people and influences. How could they have brought this screaming girl into this building without anyone noticing? How come there aren’t any other people or outside influences on the road, in the warehouse, or in any other scene outside the apartment?

This stuff kept gnawing at me and took away from the film. It made it more like a play in which the environment was sequestered from real life.

Compston was strong as the young boy being influenced by the older man who kept him safe when he was in prison. He effectively had me believing he loved both the other man and the woman they abducted for very different reasons. Marsan was perfect as the older, in-charge, driven man who loved the younger boy. Arterton was effective and good as the abducted young lady. J Blakeson wrote and directed this and for the most part it was excellent.

Overall: Outside of the nagging thoughts about where is the rest of the world in this picture, it was well acted, directed and effective.

Salt

First Hit: Despite Jolie’s strong acting and excellent execution, the ending was predictable and telegraphed.

For a film to be suspenseful it has to be set up that way. It has to keep the audience wondering what will happen and make them believe what they are seeing is really the truth. Salt was not set up to do this.

I’d be surprised if anyone in the theater thought for one minute, that Salt (played by Angelina Jolie) would turn out to be a die-hard Russian spy wanting to kill the President of the US. With that resting in one’s mind from the get go, how could one buy into the story on the screen? I didn't.

Therefore the film became one about; can this obvious story be told well and would the acting and action be engaging? To those questions the answer is yes, it was engaging and it was fun to watch.

The story is about a Russian man named Vassily Orlov (played by Daniel Olbrychski and Daniel Pearce) who wants to cause havoc in the world because he prefers the cold war fight between the U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. of the 1950's and 1960's to the present day friendship. To keep that old battle alive he kidnaps young kids in Russia and trains them to be obedient killers and spies.

Salt, who is a US Russian diplomat’s daughter, is one of them. To carry out his plan he sends these well trained people into the US to live their lives and to be ready to march on his orders to perform the covert functions they were trained to deliver.

Jolie is good and keeps the whole film interesting. She is both athletic and beautiful. You believe she can to all the things she does in the film; from beating the crap out of people to saving the world from total destruction. Liev Schreiber as Jolie’s boss Ted Winter is strong as the man who cares but also has his own secret. Chiwetel Ejiofor, as Peabody the government agent overseeing the problem of spies, is his usual strong self. Olbrychski is great as the Russian activist who wants the world to be different than it is. Phillip Noyce did well with the given script but the problem is that the script is too obvious to work as a suspenseful thriller.

Overall: It is entertaining in an action sort of way but it is not suspenseful as the ending becomes glaringly obvious as the film rolls.

Inception

First Hit: Beautifully and visually arresting but overly complicated, long and too many gun fights to make it really work.

I don’t think films need to be seen multiple times to understand them better. Films need to create the story in a way which allows one to move (pulled) into the story with thoughtfulness.

I don’t want a lot of rethinking of what I just saw, wondering how it conjoins with the part I’m seeing now and if it makes sense with the beginning or where it might be going. Good films can be complicated. A good complicated film allows the complicatedness to unfold in such a way that the audience trusts the story and director to make sense of it all which they invariably do.

There are films I will see more than once (Memento and Sixth Sense to name two) looking to see if I missed story line clues along the way which revealed an earlier ending or a plot twist which I misunderstood, but after seeing it again, I realize it was just a well-made film.

I don't see films more than once just so I can understand the film. If after seeing a film I have this thought that I have to see the film again to understand it, then in my book, the director has failed. Inception is such a film.

Christopher Nolan over complicated this story and film to make it seem intelligent. He didn’t have to. The story is already intelligent. I understood the story, but it's the execution which is flawed. I knew early on why Cobb (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) felt guilty about his wife’s death. It was obvious, the early hints at tokens and them being personal along with the longing angst.

One knew early on it wasn’t his token which he was carrying. Nolan tried to make this a pivotal part of the film but it didn't work that way. It became a weight. At 148 minutes it was laboriously long and could have used about 30 – 40 minutes of trimming. Cut out the multitude of gun battles (why were they there and what did they add?) in which only one person on the “good team” gets shot. How can people miss their target at 2 feet distance, (Think about this: I’m at the window of your van with a really big gun, you’ve got 6 people in your van and pull off 15 shots and I don’t hit anyone – not likely) especially if they are hired killers?

Much of the gun battle stuff doesn’t make sense nor does it add to the intrigue of the film's concept. Just because a person is in a dream doesn’t mean they cannot get shot; if one guy gets shot (and he did), then all can get shot (and they don't).

On the plus side, the exploration of dreams at multiple levels is interesting. The concept of inception or implanting an idea and having it take hold and grow is in someone's mind is interesting. Another really good segment in the film was the part in which Cobb hires Ariadne (played by Ellen Page) as the dream architect.

The initial scenes where she is learning how to be a dream architect are extraordinary. Page (as Ariadne) is just the right kind of person to push dream boundaries with a particular amount of intelligence and risky youthful exuberance.

DiCaprio is alright here but from an acting standpoint he hasn’t grown and his standard character is getting worn out. Page is wonderful especially at the beginning of the film. Joseph Gordon-Levitt as DiCaprio’s side kick is great as the solid piece of the team. He brought great energy and clarity to the film. Nolan did direct some great scenes with interesting pictures, but the story (by Nolan) was overwrought with needless gun fights (real or imaginative) and took away from what might have been a real psychological thriller.

Overall: Not an impressive film and certainly doesn’t live up to the hype of the previews or press.

The Square

First Hit:  One of those films which got worse the more it went on.

With my senses heightened by the very intense and shocking film short that previewed before the main attraction, I was sorely disappointed by the uninteresting main feature, The Square. 

A film requires me to care about or engage with one or more characters so that I connect and watch it with engaged interest. The Square did nothing to invite me in. Why should I have cared about Raymond Yale (played by David Roberts)?

The perpetually frowning man doesn’t speak to his wife, is having an affair, cuts construction preference deals behind the owner’s back, and treats his workers rather badly.

The film makers ask us to care because he is having an affair with Carla Smith (played by Claire van der Boom) who is married to a mullet haired tow truck driver named Greg “Smithy” Smith (played by Anthony Hays) who is hiding ill begotten money in their house. Are we supposed to feel sorry for her? She doesn’t have any kids, has a job and could leave anytime she wants.

But no, she only wants to leave her husband for another man who ignores his current wife. Are we supposed to like Smithy? No, because Smithy invites sorted friends over to the house (one who wants to have an affair with Carla), and then orders Carla around like she is his slave (“get some food up the boys are hungry"). 

Do we have any history about either marriage? No, nothing. We’re supposed to take it on face value that we are to care about Carla and Raymond because they have great front seat car sex. As they make plans to run away together, they end up accidentally killing Smithy’s mother in a arson attempt to burn Greg and Carla’s house down to hide the fact that Carla is stealing the hidden money. 

As the film moves on, the accidental killing causes a chain of events which result in more hurt people, deaths and other stupid un-thought out actions. Sitting in the theater, I realized that writer and actor Joel Edgerton and director Nash Edgerton forgot a cardinal rule of filmmaking; get the audience to buy into the premise at the beginning of the film.

Roberts wasn’t given a chance to be effective because the script was restricted. Boom was better in her role but I found it difficult to get why she was married to Smith (Hays) in the first place. Hays was good as a jerk and a demanding chauvinistic Australian husband. Joel Edgerton wrote an ineffective script and Nash Edgerton's direction didn’t make it any better.

Overall:  This film was generally a waste of time, mostly predictable and poorly conceived and executed.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

First Hit: Exciting, suspenseful, and an interesting Swedish mystery film based on the first book of a trilogy called "Millennium" by Stieg Larsson.

I must say I was a bit shocked by the level of sadistic and hostile sexual behavior as represented by 4 of the men in this film. In those moments it was hard to sit still without squirming. However, the Swedish title means "Man who Hates Women" and the screenplay by Nikolaj Arcel and Rasmus Heisterberg clearly dictated this tone.

However, this tone has a counter weight which lives in a internally raging but quietly intense Lisbeth Salander (played by Noomi Rapace), a young computer hacker, and a thoughtfully kind Mikael Blomkvist (played by Michael Nyqvist), an investigative reporter who just lost a libel case.  

A powerful industrialist wants to find out what happened to his favorite niece who disappeared from his huge home on a family island some 40 years earlier. He hires Blomkvist because he is honest and a good investigative reporter.

Unbeknownst to Blomkvist, he is assisted by the tattoo and pierced laden Salander because she sees that he’s a honorable man. Eventually, Blomkvist discovers his hidden computer ally and together they work to resolve a string of very old murders.

This resolution also assists Salander in resolving some of her personal angst and sets her off on a new life.

Rapace is powerful and clearly the star of this film. Although she is on the screen less than Nyqvist, her character is what sets the mood, tone and temperament of the film. Every scene she is in, she captured my attention. Nyqvist is a little soft spoken and less driven than what I would have expected from an investigative reporter but he's a great counter to Rapace. The Director, Niels Arden Oplev, did an outstanding job of walking the line between the exploitation of sadistic behavior and providing enough of what drives Rapace and Nyqvist to find a resolution to the mystery.

Overall: Although I was uncomfortable at times, I was impressed with this film and if the other two novels from this trilogy hit the screen, I will be there to see them.