bishop_tim

In my opinion this doesn't work as a film but would have been better as a mini series. It spends a lot of time developing interesting characters but hardly any of these characters motivations are explored in any great depth. This means it should have been a lot shorter with lots of action and limited character building, or longer with the characters fully explored. For instance his wife plays a major role but when he is released we see her a couple of times and then he is talking of divorce. Or we could have seen more of the back-stabbing that went on in the board room from his so called 'trusted' assistant. But surely we could have learnt more about the kidnappers, we weren't even let in to see who ran the crew never mind the chance to see their discussions over decision making. Part of me thinks that the director intended a certain amount of anonymity in the kidnappers, in my opinion it just doesn't work in this case making them banal rather than terrifying. I remember hearing once that a good story teller 'shows instead of tells' I think the director was trying this but it just didn't work with a film of this length with so many characters.