Spoilers herein.
Films transport you to a different world, so the beginning of the film, the initiation into that world, is key.
Scriptwriters these days seem to spend much more attention on beginnings than endings, and this film has a terrific beginning. In fact, I was so impressed by the beginning that I will recommend this otherwise dreary film.
It is dreary indeed: Travolta cannot convince that he is as brilliant as he plays. The girl is very pretty, but absolutely fails in convincing of guile and intelligence. The plot doesn't play fair, and that is a must with these types of twists. I cannot understand the hostage plan: if they could do that, why blow that capability on simply getting access to a bank terminal?
Otherwise, we have here a rather ordinary selfreferential device of actors playing actors.
Back to the beginning. That beginning has two parts: Travolta's character talks to us about "Dog Day Afternoon," and how realistic it was. That film is notable specifically because it established a new style of self-awareness, a specific type of theatrical reality. A very intelligent segment -- in what is said, how it is delivered and how the camera acts. (We are eased into this by video sputtering through the titles.) `Vertical Limit' was another disappointing film with a slam-bang beginning.
The second part of the opening segues to the very set of Dog Day, except the attitude here is much more ruthless. A hostage IS killed in a spectacular fashion. And that fashion is highly cinematic, with all sorts of post-matrix still pans and small object tracking. The point is clear: we are here creating a new form here by annotating the Lumet/Pacino model.
A very clever notion. The twists are intended to be a sort of machinegun "Usual Suspects" effect, where everything we learned is undone. Problem is that skills of everyone involved -- actor, writer, director -- aren't strong enough for what they intend, to the thrills stay tepid.
Hugh Jackman could have been the key, leaving travolta to just do his "Broken Arrow" bit but with a cigar instead of a cigarette. And Jackman has the face, halfway between Ed Norton and Mel Gibson. He's at the level of Ms. Berry though, and that's at the merely mugging level.
Finally, I have done some hacking in my time (not cracking as shown here), and I can say that nothing in this film, except maybe the keyboards, resembles either the appearance or the real mystery of the enterprise. It is far cooler and spookier than is imagined by these kids, just hard as hell to show on a screen with what they had to work with.
Films transport you to a different world, so the beginning of the film, the initiation into that world, is key.
Scriptwriters these days seem to spend much more attention on beginnings than endings, and this film has a terrific beginning. In fact, I was so impressed by the beginning that I will recommend this otherwise dreary film.
It is dreary indeed: Travolta cannot convince that he is as brilliant as he plays. The girl is very pretty, but absolutely fails in convincing of guile and intelligence. The plot doesn't play fair, and that is a must with these types of twists. I cannot understand the hostage plan: if they could do that, why blow that capability on simply getting access to a bank terminal?
Otherwise, we have here a rather ordinary selfreferential device of actors playing actors.
Back to the beginning. That beginning has two parts: Travolta's character talks to us about "Dog Day Afternoon," and how realistic it was. That film is notable specifically because it established a new style of self-awareness, a specific type of theatrical reality. A very intelligent segment -- in what is said, how it is delivered and how the camera acts. (We are eased into this by video sputtering through the titles.) `Vertical Limit' was another disappointing film with a slam-bang beginning.
The second part of the opening segues to the very set of Dog Day, except the attitude here is much more ruthless. A hostage IS killed in a spectacular fashion. And that fashion is highly cinematic, with all sorts of post-matrix still pans and small object tracking. The point is clear: we are here creating a new form here by annotating the Lumet/Pacino model.
A very clever notion. The twists are intended to be a sort of machinegun "Usual Suspects" effect, where everything we learned is undone. Problem is that skills of everyone involved -- actor, writer, director -- aren't strong enough for what they intend, to the thrills stay tepid.
Hugh Jackman could have been the key, leaving travolta to just do his "Broken Arrow" bit but with a cigar instead of a cigarette. And Jackman has the face, halfway between Ed Norton and Mel Gibson. He's at the level of Ms. Berry though, and that's at the merely mugging level.
Finally, I have done some hacking in my time (not cracking as shown here), and I can say that nothing in this film, except maybe the keyboards, resembles either the appearance or the real mystery of the enterprise. It is far cooler and spookier than is imagined by these kids, just hard as hell to show on a screen with what they had to work with.