indioblack117

I believe that if you're transporting nitroglycerin in two trucks, it would be best if the two trucks were not driving nose-to-tail. It would be better if they were separated by a time difference, so that if one truck blows up, the other doesn't go with it. I'm sure I saw this in the two previous versions of this film.

The principle of using two trucks is to improve the chances of at least one getting through. However, nobody in this film thinks about this, or they wouldn't be driving nose to tail. The glass canisters containing the nitroglycerin look quite fragile, and they are simply stacked in crates with nothing to cushion them against each other, so you hear them rattling along as the trucks hurtle around hairpin bends. I remember that "Sorceror" had the nitro sticks buried in crates of sand.

Anyway the nitro is not that powerful, because we have the heroine throwing some canisters at an attacking vehicle, and she needs three tries before the explosion is enough to knock the vehicle off the road. I'm surprised she didn't blow herself up with the overhand throwing, so once again, the nitro isn't much more powerful than apples.

Also we should question the bandits chasing a truck the size of a barn door, and failing to put one bullet, from a 50 cal machine gun, in the back of it where the nitro is stored. They can't even hit the heroine when she's climbing out of the cab and onto the roof of the nitro vehicle.

At some point, one of the crew shoots his co-driver so that he can get his share of the money that they are promised when they get there. Did I fall asleep and miss something? The hero and his brother were promised a million each to do the drive. At what point was it stated that there is a reward for completion of the job payable to whoever survives? It was quite clearly stated in both previous movies, but not in this. Suddenly, out of the blue, one driver shoots another and comes up with this fantasy idea that he will now get his share.

Anyway, point of information, the European release of "Sorceror" was a re-edit, and put the four back stories as flashbacks throughout the film. A much better version in my opinion.

This film is truly horrifying. The most horrifying bit being that they spent 20 million on this bloated, boring, pretentious load of codswallop.

But all is not lost. A re-edit could rescue this travesty.

First of all, remove the Klemperer stuff. If the director wanted to make a movie about German angst after WWII then he should go ahead and do it, but not impose it upon this story. Remove the police section; it's just silly. And remove all the stuff about Susie's childhood and her mother being ill. That should get it down to a tight 90 mins with no bother. Now, the movie starts with Susie going to the dance academy, performing her audition and being taken on. In this way, the first creepy section where the girl in the room of mirrors is folded up tighter than an origami rabbit, comes much earlier.

So, on to the end; the dance evening where all shots of Klemperer in the audience have been removed. Susie goes down to the orgy ritual, and instead of being sacrificed, announces the big reveal, and calls on the figure of Death to slaughter all the Markos acolytes. Klemperer will be cut out of this scene also. He was never there. The film ends on a long close up of Susie's face, and the audience can read any emotion into it that they want. The End.

Oh, and using the Goblin music from the original movie wouldn't go amiss.

So Ben is being executed and the camera dwells on his face and then fades to black. We then cut to a country road with a guy wearing a hoodie walking along it. A vehicle pulls up and the driver says "Are you the new groundsman?" And the hoodie guy turns round and it's Ben. He replies "Yes".

Whoa there, what happened between him dying and walking along a country road?

I'll just doctor the script a little here.

After the fade to black of Ben being executed, the screen fills with a flash of white light. A moment later and Ben sits up into frame, blinking against he light, confused as to whether he is alive or dead. A dark figure appears in the whiteness and comes towards him, blurred at first, but slowly focusing. The figure says "Are you ready to do God's work?" It is a priest and Ben weakly gets up and follows him down a long, blinding white corridor that gradually darkens as they enter a chapel where the priest details the cleaning schedule that Ben will have to perform. Is Ben in Heaven, or Hell, or alive? We will find out as we return to the original script.

Ben realises he is in an institution designed to rehabilitate criminals, and the execution was faked.

But he can't be grateful for his second chance and wants to go back to his wife. He escapes, steals a truck and returns to the family home. His wife greets him with all the emotion of him being away for the weekend. Fade to black. The End.

So now we extend this scene. Suddenly three police cruisers screech into the drive. Armed cops get out and handcuff Ben, dragging him into one of the vehicles. His wife drops to her knees, sobbing. Now she'll suffer the heartache of him being executed a second time.

If you're going to base a screenplay on the Rashomon style, you really need to understand the very simple concept, which is that each character tells their story from their own point of view. So when Matt Damon's wife rolls her eyes after Matt's clumsy attempt at rough intercourse, and he says he felt she liked it, we should have seen her liking it. It's his point of view, after all. Her hating it should have come out in her point of view segment. The rapist Lord and the rapee Lady's stories are almost identical particularly in the rape scene. A brief shot of her slippers coming off as she heads up the staircase is subtly different in the two stories. Did she kick them off, hoping for sex, or did they fall off in her hurry to get away from the scoundrel intent on bedding her? What does it matter? Their two recollections of the rape are otherwise identical. The Lord is seen raping her (in both versions), but when challenged, he claims he didn't rape her. So he's lying. Then should not his point of view be seen as her leading him on into having sex with her? Since the plot cannot hinge on the differing points of view, instead we are given a lecture on the morals of Medieval France. The Lord did not rape the Lady, because back in them days, it was absolutely permitted for a Lord to have sex with any woman they wanted. Even another Lord's wife. In fact the term "rape" probably didn't exist. As we all know, rape wasn't even a crime in Italy until 1990, so Medieval France would have been awfully woke if it had made rape a crime back then. So the homage to Rashomon is a waste of time. Literally, since we see the same scene twice. Far better to have a traditional unfolding story (even with flashbacks, but no twice told tales) which concentrates on the mores of the time which allow Lords to violate women when they feel like it. This would give more gravitas to the Lady in having the courage to denounce her violator, persuade her husband to defend her honour in mortal combat, and risk being burned alive if he lost.

Since everyone is slagging of his moustache, I thought I'd better start by saying what a splendid moustache Branagh decided to wear. He even had a genius moustache cover for when sleeping. The photography was beautiful. The camera movements around the train, the shots through distorting glass where everyone had two faces, the interesting camera angles were superb. The CGI was extraordinarily brilliant, especially the shots of the train chugging through picturesque landscapes. The period feel was captured wonderfully. The staging was brilliant. Having the train perched on a high trestle bridge whilst the investigation was conducted was a stroke of genius, as was the recreation of the Last Supper painting when all the suspects were lined up. I knew who done it already. But that didn't spoil it, because the business with Poirot handing the gun over and saying they should shoot him, was a wonderful surprise trick. This may not be everyone's cup of tea, but for me it was a perfect cup.

Excellent film if you're coming at it cold. Fortunately, a friend recommended it to me, but warned me not to read anything about it beforehand. Good warning. Essential warning because the IMDB page has it's own spoiler in plain sight: "Plot Keywords: hypnosis, brain surgery ". The movie is beautifully shot; pleasant laid back opening about boyfriend going to meet girlfriend's parents. Then it starts to get a little bit unsettling. So basically, all been done before, but this is nicely done, and has a crowd-pleasing finale, which would have pleased me even more if he'd caved her head in with the rifle butt, but that's just a personal observation. So, after watching the film, I decided to read the IMDB trivia and was stunned that I'd just been watching a movie about white oppression of blacks, and never realised. Oh yeah, the lead guy is black. I was still rooting for him. That's what you do when watching movies, you root for the lead guy. So when he goes to meet her parents (she's white, by the way) he's a bit nervous. A bit nervous, like any guy is when going to meet the girlfriend's parents, and then the rest of the family come round and some are a bit weird. We've all been there; Black or White. I might have thought the boyfriend was being a bit racist when he sought out the other black guy at the garden party, but then people tend to gravitate to people they feel they can connect with, rather than to people they can't, so no racism there. Apparently most white people think the girlfriend must have been drugged or hypnotised to do what she did. Hell no: she's evil. That's why I wanted the boyfriend to stove her head in. Anyway, if her folks are white supremacists (as the trivia suggests) why the heck would they want to transplant their parents' brains and the brains of their friends into black bodies? "Whoa, get me a white body, man, because I'm a white supremacist". I do get tired of the cliche of some bad guy being beaten over the head twice, and then he turns up later to attack the hero again. Hit him three times, man. Then five more. And by the way, if you're going to do a brain transplant, you remove the host-body brain first, so that the transplant brain remains fresher. But then that wouldn't have given the boyfriend time to escape. Next time lets' have a movie about a White guy going to meet his Black girlfriend's parents. And then hear the howls about a movie badmouthing Black families. The friend-of-hero is brilliant. A great comic turn, which leads to the greatest scene in the movie, where he tries to explain to a police woman that he thinks his friend has been abducted to be a sex slave, and she calls her superiors round, and then they all listen to the story again. There's a beat and then they all fall about laughing. Brilliant. For that scene, this is a 10/10 movie. Shame I read the trivia.

It doesn't surprise me that the makers of this hopeless movie couldn't find a UK distributor, and then had to release it as a free DVD with a Sunday newspaper. The distributors could clearly see what the film-makers and the Sunday newspaper couldn't, that this was one movie that just wasn't going to recoup its costs.

Since it's a thriller about riddles, it would have helped if they'd picked a lead actor who could enunciate properly, rather than the mumbling Vinnie Jones who appears to pronounce "riddle" as "riell". And it would have helped if the dialogue hadn't been swamped by noisy locations or scenes flooded with distracting and inappropriate music. The plot is ludicrous: The lost Charles Dickens story supposedly helps our hero solve a series of modern murders, but so would a copy of Herge's Adventures Of Tintin, since the link between Dickens and Jones is more non-existent than tenuous. And we have the ridiculous premise that a would-be investigative journalist who lays his hands on a previously undiscovered Dickens manuscript, would take several days to read it, just so that flashbacks to Dickens can continue to be played throughout the movie, as if they had some connection to it. Which they don't. I mean, if you found a new Dickens manuscript, wouldn't you just go somewhere quiet and read it ? The film ends with one of those surprise revelations that have become mandatory since The Sixth Sense, but in this case it doesn't so much surprise you as insult your intelligence. If the film is suddenly going to turn supernatural at the twelfth hour, then revealing that Vinnie Jones is a robot might have been more acceptable. It might not have seemed so turgid if the film had been stylish, but it isn't. And in several places it appears decidedly amateur: There's a scene where a table is laid with a 60's jump-cut technique, but they haven't made sure that the person actually laying the table is completely out of frame between the cuts. Consequently, you can see things changing at the edge of frame, when you're really supposed to be watching things changing at the centre of frame. A good rule in movie-making is: If you don't understand how to do a technique then try something else.

The real riddle is why anyone thought it would be a good idea to make this movie in the first place.

SPOILERS, SPOILERS, SPOILERS.

It took me no time at all to realise that the obvious solution to Christian Bale's "Transported Man" trick was that he had a twin. And scene after scene confirmed this: You know, main character always shot in a way you couldn't really see him, in shadow, big hair, big hat. But it took me quite some time to realise that this was merely a distraction that audiences were supposed to cling on to, in order to distract them from the real trick in the film. What a disappointment then, that the real trick was a fantasy element, a piece of supernatural design that undermined the point of the film: that everything in magic is illusion. The final trick was no trick at all, but a chunk of science fiction. ***MAIN SPOILER *** Hugh Jackman persuades the scientist Tesla to create a machine that clones him. In his final 100 performances, he repeatedly clones himself and commits suicide so that his clone lives and Christian Bale can be accused of his murder. Quite how one distinguishes between who is the real person when a clone is manufactured is glossed over. But clearly, as far as the film is concerned, when the original version of you dies, you live on in the clone. This might have been acceptable in the key scene where Jackman creates his first clone, had the outcome been different. In the movie, Jackman immediately shoots the clone dead. And yet conversely, his final trick is based on him dying and the clone surviving. Perhaps if in that key scene, Jackman had put the gun to his own head and committed suicide, so that he lived on in the clone, then that science fiction concept might have had some credibility. As it is, the scene seems to become another attempt to try and confuse the audience, leaving me with a distasteful set of plot-holes to ponder, rather than accepting a stunningly designed and shocking finale.

Steven Seagal appears to be sleepwalking through a dreadful movie shot almost entirely in close-up to disguise the complete lack of budget and resources. To pick on the technical flaws - silver F/A-18s and F-14s take of from a carrier for an air-strike, and miraculously become camouflaged F-16s for the actual strike - would give this movie more credibility than it deserves. Suffice it to say that the most interesting thing in the movie is the credit titles which fade on and then disappear in a lightning wipe, which presumably is available to all users of Final Cut Pro. Putting all your creativity into your own credit puts Michael Keusch in the same category as Marcel Mandu.

The problem with this movie for English speaking viewers is that the English Language version was cut and then dubbed in an appallingly slipshod way. If you refer to the original Italian or French versions, you find that the dialogue is much more profound and intentionally comedic in places. Most of this was steamrollered over with bland lip-fitting inanities in the US version. At one point, Curridius stuffs a bunch of grapes into a slave-trader's face to shut him up, and in the original version, comments to his friends that people will just think he's drunk. The US dialogue has Curridius saying "Did you see his face when I offered him the two talents?" Don't blame Cottafavi for that, please.

The reason the French and Italians love Cottafavi is that they are seeing his movies as intended, not butchered to fit a TV screen, and dubbed with nonsensical dialogue.

Also, don't forget that this was the movie that 20th Century Fox bought for a million from its producers, so they could put it on the shelf, and make sure it wouldn't interfere with the blockbuster release of its own Elizabeth-Taylor-starring CLEOPATRA. Maybe when they eventually put it out on Television, they intentionally had it badly dubbed just so you wouldn't like it.