Die Kehrseite der Medaille

I find 'The Underneath' to be a 'weird' movie, and I don't mean 'weird' in a good way. It's weird in a negative way, it just doesn't make sense in some parts, like the stranger in the hospital, or the hidden agendas of everyone in this movie.

I think the scriptwriter wanted to make this a cool-twisted thriller, but it came out as a mashed up incoherent drama.

Peter Gallagher was good and William Fichtner even better, but they were not enough to save this movie from being boring and incoherent. Too bad Elisabeth Shue didn't have more scenes and we didn't get to see more of Adam Trese's character which left more questions than answers.

I suggest you watch this movie only if you have nothing better to do.

I saw this film as a part of a school course on film appreciation, focusing mostly on film-noir. It built slowly with a fascinating story, and honestly I was intrigued by many of the sequences especially the scene where the main character watches the football game and the rendezvous under the bridge.

I was also interested in all of the supporting characters like elizabeth shue's role and the smarmy brother.

The action toward the end built up to a climax that would bring it all together. And, the most I could say for the climax was that it did. But it also spiraled into a conventional, predictable, and altogether disappointing ending. I walked away unhappy with the whole experience.

This was the first time I was disappointed with Soderbergh's work, so for a more satisfying experience, in a similar genre, see The Limey.

Michael (Gallagher) left his hometown after making a mess. Such, leaving Rachel, her wife to take care it. Later, he comeback to his hometown

Underneath is a slow burner tragedy, where nothing are well, as the guy makes risky choices instead good ones. Pay attention to the switches from the present to past to truly follow the story. And it's a kinda slow at the start.

Steven Soderbergh always has interesting things to say about small Texas towns and the film The Underneath is one of his more interesting and articulate. Peter Gallagher stars as Michael Chambers, a gambler who returns to his small rural town for his mother's nuptials. While in town he tries to reignite an old flame with his ex-girlfriend, Rachel, but this leads to more problems than she's worth. Michael finds himself in a dangerous situation when Rachel's fiancée, Tommy, played by the hugely underrated William Fichtner, finds out about Michael. The Underneath has all of that familiar indie Soderbergh feel that is complete with suspense, mystery, ambiguity, and characters whose personal issues go far and beyond what the normal person living the normal life is used to.

The Underneath is a slow moving film that starts out seeming fairly pointless at first. But as it develops it grows more and more interesting. The noir-ish atmosphere combined with Soderbergh's tense cinematic style keeps this film quietly engaging. For a while it feels like a film that doesn't have much purpose and seems to be pretty straightforward. The first half of the film follows Michael as he tries to rebuild his relationships with all the people he abandoned years ago when he lost a substantial amount of money while betting. He tries to rekindle his love with Rachel, tries to make his mother happy with him again, and tries to keep his brother from hating him. The first half of the film holds no surprises but raises interesting questions and keeps you around waiting for more.

Then comes the second half of The Underneath where things really kick off and it shapes into the film that it had set out to be from the opening suspenseful tone. The mystery builds and we become innately fascinated by what is going on. The plot twists and turns right up to the very last shot which throws the entire story for a loop. It's great filmmaking and excellently engaging storytelling on an intriguingly small scale. There's nothing flashy about The Underneath, but that's what one should expect from Soderbergh.

I wouldn't say that this is a film for everybody, but fans of Soderbergh would be foolish not to check it out. It's a film with a great story, a compelling atmosphere, an consistently suspenseful tone, a good script, and decent acting. I don't know that there's much more that I could want from this fine little film.

These days, Stephen Soderbergh has a reputation as a director capable of pleasing arthouse critics and mainstream fans alike. Personally, I'm unconvinced of his claims to greatness even now; but it's certainly clear, whatever its absolute merits, how "Underneath", which dates from 1995, is lacking in slickness compared with the director's subsequent works, which it nonetheless resembles in form if not in competence.

Basically, this is a bank-heist thriller, but shot in a very tricksy style. To list a few of the devices employed, we get colour-filtered lenses, flashbacks (confusing because the main character has a big grey beard in the chronologically earliest scenes, and thus looks younger when supposed to be older), disjunctions of speech and image (used more successfully four years later by Soderbergh in "The Limey"), edgy-camera work, contrived (though sometimes powerful) scene-framing, and the pseudo-documentary time stamps that flash up on screen almost at random. In fact, it's less of a mess than the length of this list suggests; but it never seems natural. The viewer always feels that he is being set up. What is not clear is why.

The real problem is that it is very hard to care about any of the characters. Soderbergh hints at motivation, but fails to follow through. One could argue that the film is trying to be intelligent, leaving the viewer to fill in the gaps. The problem here is not that this is difficult (except at the very end) but that it happens too often - there's more gap than substance, the script plays with itself instead of fleshing out. With no real insight into human nature here, the end result is not so much bleak as pointless.

There are many worse, more stupid films than this. But trying to be clever does not in itself make a great movie. These days Soderbergh does clever without trying. Whether that makes his recent work better, or simply better-disguised, is an interesting question.