This is an odd but engaging film about the aftermath of a suicide-bombing in London that essentially blows itself up in the end. Just like a normal day shattered by a terrorist explosion, this movie gets you to invest a bit of your heart and mind in it and then breaks completely apart, leaving you stunned and wondering what the hell happened.
Michelle Williams plays a young mother who's drifted away from her policeman husband (Nicholas Gleaves). He works in bomb disposal and the demand of his job consumes him, leaving her with just their young son (Sidney Johnson). The boy becomes everything to his mother. Well, not quite everything. What she can't get from her son, she heads out to a pub to get from a journalist named Jasper Black (Ewan McGregor).
One day, Jasper and the young mother are having sex in her home while her husband and son are at a soccer match. They fornicate while the match plays on TV, stopping only when the soccer stadium erupts into smoke, screams and booming death. It turns out six Muslim suicide-bombers attacked the stadium and killed over a thousand people, including the young mother's husband and son.
Now, here's where the story gets a little weird. Jasper discovers that the authorities are concealing the identity of one of the bombers, but doesn't know the reason why. After setting up that mystery, though, the film totally ignores it for a long time and dwells instead on the young mother dealing with her grief. She actually befriends the son of the hidden bomber (Usman Khokar) and even starts up a relationship with the head of London's anti-terror unit (Matthew Macfayden), who turns out to have had a crush on her for years. Then just as you think the movie has forgotten about the mystery and it won't be important to the story, it re-emerges and sets off a chain of events that lead to a final 15 minutes or so of the film that are so stupid and nonsensical that I couldn't believe what I was watching. Let me put it this way - Incendiary concludes with narration from the young mother, reading from a letter she wrote to Osama Bin Laden about how she's not really angry with him anymore and basically wishes they could hug it out. And that's not the dumbest thing in the last part of this movie.
I've seen a lot of bad films with bad endings. I don't think I've ever seen a good film that ends as badly as Incendiary. As the story careened to a finish, I literally said out loud "You've got to be kidding me!" on several different occasions. The awfulness is magnified by how much I liked the rest of the movie. Michelle Williams is quite good as someone equally consumed by grief, guilt and longing. There's also a fairly wise theme running through the story where British resilience in the face of Hitler's missiles in WWI is held up as an example of how to deal with modern terrorism. Yet, all of it turns to crap because of Incendiary's atrocious closing.
The best description of this film can be found in an episode of South Park. Eric Cartman spends the first half of the show with a giant, alien satellite dish going into and out of his ass. He describes the sensation as taking an enormous dump and then having that colossal turd shoot back up into your body. That's what Incendiary is like. It feels good and then it feels really, really, really, strangely bad.
Michelle Williams plays a young mother who's drifted away from her policeman husband (Nicholas Gleaves). He works in bomb disposal and the demand of his job consumes him, leaving her with just their young son (Sidney Johnson). The boy becomes everything to his mother. Well, not quite everything. What she can't get from her son, she heads out to a pub to get from a journalist named Jasper Black (Ewan McGregor).
One day, Jasper and the young mother are having sex in her home while her husband and son are at a soccer match. They fornicate while the match plays on TV, stopping only when the soccer stadium erupts into smoke, screams and booming death. It turns out six Muslim suicide-bombers attacked the stadium and killed over a thousand people, including the young mother's husband and son.
Now, here's where the story gets a little weird. Jasper discovers that the authorities are concealing the identity of one of the bombers, but doesn't know the reason why. After setting up that mystery, though, the film totally ignores it for a long time and dwells instead on the young mother dealing with her grief. She actually befriends the son of the hidden bomber (Usman Khokar) and even starts up a relationship with the head of London's anti-terror unit (Matthew Macfayden), who turns out to have had a crush on her for years. Then just as you think the movie has forgotten about the mystery and it won't be important to the story, it re-emerges and sets off a chain of events that lead to a final 15 minutes or so of the film that are so stupid and nonsensical that I couldn't believe what I was watching. Let me put it this way - Incendiary concludes with narration from the young mother, reading from a letter she wrote to Osama Bin Laden about how she's not really angry with him anymore and basically wishes they could hug it out. And that's not the dumbest thing in the last part of this movie.
I've seen a lot of bad films with bad endings. I don't think I've ever seen a good film that ends as badly as Incendiary. As the story careened to a finish, I literally said out loud "You've got to be kidding me!" on several different occasions. The awfulness is magnified by how much I liked the rest of the movie. Michelle Williams is quite good as someone equally consumed by grief, guilt and longing. There's also a fairly wise theme running through the story where British resilience in the face of Hitler's missiles in WWI is held up as an example of how to deal with modern terrorism. Yet, all of it turns to crap because of Incendiary's atrocious closing.
The best description of this film can be found in an episode of South Park. Eric Cartman spends the first half of the show with a giant, alien satellite dish going into and out of his ass. He describes the sensation as taking an enormous dump and then having that colossal turd shoot back up into your body. That's what Incendiary is like. It feels good and then it feels really, really, really, strangely bad.