Blood (2012)
In a police station seemingly plagued by nepotism, Brian Cox plays the old retired head of a local police station, while Stephen Graham and Paul Bettany play the two brothers who are now working in the police station that their father used to run. Apparently there was a time when their father was also their boss and he also showed favouritism towards them, giving less recognition to Mark Strong's character who also worked there and still works alongside the two brothers.
Brian Cox's character regularly tells stories about the heavy-handed methods that were used in the past to extract information and confessions from suspects. The two brothers become convinced that they should use similar techniques with their current case, but something goes wrong.
The big mistake causes guilt to well up in both brothers and Mark Strong's character seems to be better at sniffing out clues than they give him credit for. Meanwhile, even with Alzheimers, Brian Cox's ex-police chief character has a sense of what is going on around him.
Sadly overall the film is rather formulaic. The problem is that the film is wonderfully acted and wonderfully directed but rather flimsily written.
There's a wonderfully effective scene where Paul Bettany is deliberately upsetting a witness with obsessive compulsive disorder while undermining his testimony. The effect of each action he does, such as moving the witness's household items around or touching things the witness wouldn't want touched, is made abundantly clear to the audience. But the problem is, obsessive compulsive disorder is becoming rather tropey these days and when this character is thrown in out of the blue, it feels rather cheap to give him this disorder. So while the direction and acting in that scene is magnificent, the whole premise of it feels fake.
This isn't just a one-off issue. It's prevalent throughout the film. Everything is wonderfully acted and all emotional points are laid out well by the director, but the story is just too cliched for its own good. And over the course of the storyline it's not simply that the ending feels inevitable, like in a Greek tragedy, but that the way the plot fails to move on feels frustrating. It's not even a pacing problem. It's a "for goodness sake won't you just stop being an idiot" problem.
"Blood" had a lot of potential, but the script needed a severe re-write.
D+
The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2012)
Riz Ahmed appears to be making a career out of projects related to the East/West divide and the War on Terror. I first saw him in a TV mini-series called "Britz" where he played a Pakistani who decided to enlist with MI5 to spy on potential Islamist terrorist threats within his local community. The second part of the drama was about his sister gradually becoming radicalised, which I found rather messed up what had been done in the first half. Still, Riz Ahmed was an entertaining lead.
I saw him again in the Islamist terrorist comedy "Four Lions". That was a bit of a weird project and I felt a little uncomfortable about the idea, but I gave it a watch. Initially it turned out to feel a bit like "Only Fools And Horses" with Islamist terrorists. It's about a group of ridiculous people who have a goal they are clearly never going to achieve, except that instead of becoming millionaires it's blowing themselves up as martyrs. That actually worked well for a while, but when they turned out to be capable of wiring a bomb up properly in the second half my opinion of the film dropped dramatically. Still, once again, Riz Ahmed was a confident lead.
So is "The Reluctant Fundamentalist" finally the awesome project which is going to shoot Riz Ahmed into international stardom? Probably not. But is it finally a film which does Riz Ahmed justice? Well, I'm afraid I'm not sure. Riz Ahmed's is still clearly giving a strong performance, but as with all these projects I find it hard to fully suspend my disbelief. Perhaps this is a problem with the kind of projects Riz Ahmed selects, but I didn't have this problem with "Zero Dark Thirty" or "The Infidel" (to pick two sides of the spectrum). It may just be that Riz Ahmed's performances do not ever seem genuine to me. I can appreciate what he is doing, but I can't ever seem to take it at face value.
Here Riz Ahmed's protagonist starts off by working for a big financial company. He has to work very hard to get in and Kiefer Sutherland is fantastic as his pushy boss. Eventually though, he finds his ethics being pushed to breaking point by the job. He's a pretty liberal Muslim, drinking alcohol and having pre-marital sex. Rather these are ethical considerations which might test any reasonable person. And eventually Ahmed's character decides to go back to Pakistan and become a teacher.
But where we start the film, Ahmed is already a teacher and he is telling his story to a journalist, who actually seems to have ties to the CIA. Perhaps it's Ahmed's innocent face, but I actually have real trouble accepting he's a villain. Liev Schrieber who plays the CIA guy/journalist(?) clearly suspects him and Ahmed makes a few incendiary comments, but it's all too clear that the film is just playing with expectations. There's never really any good reason given to the audience why they should suspect Ahmed of anything and the whole storyline of his career as an economist in the US ends up feeling like a massive tangent, when perhaps it might have been better off being the main focus of the film.
As a Pakistani economist who faces racial profiling and racial hatred after the 9/11 attacks and becomes disillusioned as a result - I can just about buy into that storyline. But the insinuation that he then went back to Pakistan and became a terrorist? I know this is based on a book, so perhaps they skipped over a vital step, but we never seem to have any explanation as to why he is under suspicion.
In the end "The Reluctant Fundamentalist" is a bit of a mess. I really wanted to like this and I really think there's a more suitable project for Riz Ahmed out there somewhere. But somehow so much of the War On Terror-related fiction seems to be lacking in depth. Perhaps "Zero Dark Thirty" made the right decision by showing events as face value and withholding moral judgements. Whenever these types of films try to get preachy it generally seems to fall flat. (I should probably point out that "The Infidel" isn't really about the War on Terror, so it doesn't have the same problems.)
D+
A Hijacking (2012)
Admittedly I saw this quite a while back. My main disincentive for seeing "Captain Phillips" was that, to be quite frank, it didn't have a hope in hell of being as good as this. Heck, the trailer for Captain Phillips had Tom Hanks and the leader of the pirates talking sociology together. (And after the bizarre simplified politics of "Green Zone", not to mention the fairly vacuous 'revelations' of the Bourne movies, I'm not sure I can trust Greengrass to handle a subject like this well).
"A Hijacking" is a Danish movie which splits its attention between the crew on the ship and a member of the company tasked with negotiating with the pirates. As an expert negotiator when it comes to contracts, our protagonist safely back in the company building is not prepared to delegate responsibility for the crew of this ship to anyone else. He takes the whole business very seriously. However, the pressure doesn't only come from the crew being kept at sea with their lives in danger, but also from the other company heads who are rather less than patient with the whole negotiation process.
The pacing is fantastic and I feel like the film is made more tense by the distinct lack of a musical score. There's almost a documentary feel to the movie, not because of a shaky cam or anything like that, but just because the tension comes from the situation and not from dramatic music.
The way the pirates are handled would also very interesting. Most of the pirates do not speak any language that the members of the crew we see can understand. There's one that we spend more time with than any other and while he's not always completely standoffish, he never stops holding his gun facing pretty much straight at the captive crewmembers and there's always a sense that he's more toying with the crew rather than making friends with them. There's also a very manipulative figure who speaks perfect English and seems to be in charge of negotiations, but refuses to accept any suggestion that he himself is a pirate. He claims to be as much at the pirates mercy as anyone else, though it seems fairly clear that this isn't true.
The most interesting element of this film are the mind games involved. That is why the focus on the company negotiator is so clever. While we see the helplessness of the crew, we also see the helplessness of the negotiators who have very little control over the situation. Not a minute is wasted in this excellent drama.
A+