......as a NETFLIX rental and thought it was well made and entertaining.
The Link
If you enjoyed such movies as "The Parallax View," "Three Days of the Condor," either version of "The Manchurian Candidate," "Blow Out," "The Conversation" or the more recent Bourne Trilogy, I think you might find this action/drama/ thriller, which has almost non-stop action, assassination plot, terrorist/turncoat conspiracy and continuing revelation from multiple perspectives as its plot keywords, worthwhile.
It moves faster, for longer, than any version of Mission: Impossible or James Bond I've yet seen.
And there's a strong cast of familiar faces to enjoy.
This film has only a bare minimum of character development, but the maintained excitement level is really high.
In all those other movies I mentioned above, plus every Dirty Harry or Secret Service flick Clint Eastwood has ever made, the action always slows down for something, but that's hardly the case here.
Because the sequence of events takes place in just about a single hour of elapsed story time, the whole movie itself lasts less than an hour and a half and the entire location covers only a couple of square miles.
So between the multiple replays of the action, which are seen each time from a different character's viewpoint and/or always with more revealed or explained, plus a very eventful car chase sequence that takes just under 10 minutes of actual screen time, there's no real downtime in this flick.
Well-directed, with fast-paced editing, this movie really moves.
I wouldn't want all cinema thrillers to be made this way, but thought it worked nicely here.
I think this story's layered complexity was wound and unwound very skillfully.
Others might find the the repeated reviewing (from different perspectives) of the events that occurred to be tedious, but I'll give the director, Pete Travis, much credit for making that particular story telling technique more interesting than redundant for me.
It was done with speed and quick editing, making it effective rather than a hang up, IMHO.
There's little back-story, zero sex, scant pause for much conversation, no coffee breaks or pretty scenery and not much secondary plotting.
Just a juggernaut of events that become self-explanatory as the climatic scenes unfold and then the film ends just as quickly as it began.
I thought it was quite enjoyable as an action flick, with somewhat less suspension of belief required than is often needed from me while watching films of that genre.
And as a big bonus to me, there was no unsteady, jerky or tilted camera work here, a welcome change from the jumbled cinematography that Jason Bourne had to overcome to keep me focused.
My only difficulty was that some of the bad guys looked enough alike that I couldn't always tell them apart.
Less racial profiling from me might have solved this minor problem.
I liked it enough to recommend it as a rental.
The Link
If you enjoyed such movies as "The Parallax View," "Three Days of the Condor," either version of "The Manchurian Candidate," "Blow Out," "The Conversation" or the more recent Bourne Trilogy, I think you might find this action/drama/ thriller, which has almost non-stop action, assassination plot, terrorist/turncoat conspiracy and continuing revelation from multiple perspectives as its plot keywords, worthwhile.
It moves faster, for longer, than any version of Mission: Impossible or James Bond I've yet seen.
And there's a strong cast of familiar faces to enjoy.
This film has only a bare minimum of character development, but the maintained excitement level is really high.
In all those other movies I mentioned above, plus every Dirty Harry or Secret Service flick Clint Eastwood has ever made, the action always slows down for something, but that's hardly the case here.
Because the sequence of events takes place in just about a single hour of elapsed story time, the whole movie itself lasts less than an hour and a half and the entire location covers only a couple of square miles.
So between the multiple replays of the action, which are seen each time from a different character's viewpoint and/or always with more revealed or explained, plus a very eventful car chase sequence that takes just under 10 minutes of actual screen time, there's no real downtime in this flick.
Well-directed, with fast-paced editing, this movie really moves.
I wouldn't want all cinema thrillers to be made this way, but thought it worked nicely here.
I think this story's layered complexity was wound and unwound very skillfully.
Others might find the the repeated reviewing (from different perspectives) of the events that occurred to be tedious, but I'll give the director, Pete Travis, much credit for making that particular story telling technique more interesting than redundant for me.
It was done with speed and quick editing, making it effective rather than a hang up, IMHO.
There's little back-story, zero sex, scant pause for much conversation, no coffee breaks or pretty scenery and not much secondary plotting.
Just a juggernaut of events that become self-explanatory as the climatic scenes unfold and then the film ends just as quickly as it began.
I thought it was quite enjoyable as an action flick, with somewhat less suspension of belief required than is often needed from me while watching films of that genre.
And as a big bonus to me, there was no unsteady, jerky or tilted camera work here, a welcome change from the jumbled cinematography that Jason Bourne had to overcome to keep me focused.
My only difficulty was that some of the bad guys looked enough alike that I couldn't always tell them apart.
Less racial profiling from me might have solved this minor problem.
I liked it enough to recommend it as a rental.
