The Counterfeiters (2007)

I'll probably get kneecapped for saying this but these films are starting to suffer from predictability.

You sit there knowing that there will soon appear the foul-mouthed guard who will indulge in a random beating for no reason. You will also know that the same guard will spend the duration randomly bursting out laughing in a sleazy manner. There will be the baby-faced officer who is a family man. There will be the sympathetic who is then cruelly taken out and shot.

One after another you tick these boxes in grim succession to the final frame. So what actually is the point? Why masochistically go through being told what one already knows, so that one can patronize oneself that this is "serious" cinema and we are all true humanists for dutifully sitting through it? Well maybe.

The film is competently acted and respectfully directed although I do wish "shaky cam" would hang up its coat. But the necessity of another such film is a big question mark for me. There, I've said it. Do I feel better? Not much.