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BaftaBaby 
"Always entranced by cinema."
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 Posted - 12/23/2010 : 15:17:48
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Apologies if someone else has started thread on this, but I couldn't find one.
Anyway - this taut quasi-thriller has had a staggered global release and is on the list for this year's Bafta Awards, so I'm just catching up.
It's almost Pinteresque in the way it transcends genre, and though it might have worked as a three-hander stageplay, it never feels closed in. There's LOTS wrong with it, but also plenty right.
That's mainly down to the terse menace of Eddie Marson as Vic, the meticulous kidnapper, fully confident, wholly convinced he has planned for every contingency. Martin Compston plays Danny, his accomplice. They appear to be working together like clockwork. It's a job. Do the kidnap, follow the plan, and wind up as rich as small-time criminals think is big buck-land. Chump change, of course, to bankers, CEOs and stock-market high rollers.
But this is a different world from that. This is a rusty-dusty British world, and debut director J. Blakeson maps the territory well. His sure-fire command of the screen is one of the film's big pluses. Sadly, he also wrote the screenplay, which just slithers away from him.
As does the eponymous kidnap victim. And, despite being hampered by way more than her various tethers, Gemma Arterton really acquits herself well. She's definitely got enough talent and intellect to be offered more layered and challenging roles that this, or - come to that - than the equally scrappy Tamara Drewe.
But, as his screenplay for The Descent shows, Blakeson doesn't really seem interested in any socio-political extrapolations from the canny dramatic devices he engineers so precisely. He possesses neither Pinter's more subtle contrasts between victim and abuser as in his remarkable playlet for The National Theatre - One For The Road, nor John Huston's exploration of trust among the most untrustworthy in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
Blakeson presents as bare-boned a set-up as we need, and by the first ten almost wordless minutes, we're pretty sure we know or intuit everything we need to about the two villains.
That we learn so much more as the film progresses is fully justified. But what's missing is any reason to care. And of course if we can't care about these two, what about the victim herself?
And that's the film's biggest flaw. It doesn't seem to matter to Blakeson what will befall her, so it never really matters to us. He handles her character with all the objectivity of the items that put her in the control of the men.
He might have been filming an ad for bondage gear. Indeed when the men go shopping - a brilliantly executed scene - you almost expect a jingle and pack-shot.
I hope he teams up with a writer who can best structure the stories that claim him - they're highly commercial and he'll be able to hone his directorial skill before being diverted by some auteur notion when he really has nothing to say.
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Edited by - BaftaBaby on 12/27/2010 19:10:27 |
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Salopian 
"Four ever European"
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Posted - 12/23/2010 : 17:52:30
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quote:
Originally posted by BaftaBabe
Apologies if someone else has started thread on this, but I couldn't find one.
Well, now that you know about the original thread (which I found simply through the Search feature), you can move your post there. |
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Alice Creed- please see my Bafta thread
