Proximity

That is the only thing I can positive to say about this movie. Cleveland is the star, I've been there and never saw the city look this good. Beautiful river and cityscapes.

This movie moves ahead at such a pace they hope you won't notice the lack of real world relevance. People running around and shooting guns without any consequence. For example, there is a shoot out at Rob Lowe's character's house- two cars are stolen, and yet the cops don't show up there till much later in the movie. Murder for hire never looked so implausible.

Whoever wrote this movie should be on the receiving end of one the movies countless stray bullets. Many of the actors in this movie are so much better than this. I check the date of the movie just to make sure it wasn't written during the writers strike but alas this was not the case. This movie is currently in rotation on Universal's HD channel- unless you want to drool of over Lowe there is no reason to watch it.

I missed the first half hour of this, while watching something else on cable. Nobody has yet reported on it, so here's what I can contribute. The film was certainly better than average for its genre, which is pretty top-heavy with trash. The story-line is definitely imaginative, escaping quite well from the same-old-same-old. It should come as no surprise to anyone that James Coburn did not become a better actor during his absence from the screen, but he was not badly cast in his role. In general, a watchable film. With 20-odd choices on my digital cable, anything I watch is at least in the 95th percentile, which makes it about *** out of five.

Proximity is the low-budget sister of The Fugitive, involving a man on the run from the law to see that justice is served, an endless marathon through back streets to avoid being seen, bad guys who always aim the gun at the good guy's feet - these are just a few of the sorry clichés Proximity uses to construct a story. The dialogue is a bad combination of three-line sentences and meaningless diatribes. We've seen and heard all this before, except this time an unknown director puts a moderately pleasing thumbprint on it.

Proximity challenges our notions of justice. William Conroy (Rob Lowe) certainly is OK. The former lawyer threw back a few too many drinks, grabbed the car keys, and his beautiful mistress was dead before the sun rose. Conroy walked away from the crash, but was sent to jail for six months, convicted of vehicular manslaughter. For whatever reason, he's in jail with the worst of them: murderers, drug dealers, career thugs. Conroy is no threat to commit another crime because he's the hero of a relatively well-constructed film that suffers from a nowhere script.

As far as questioning justice, Proximity shows that not all the bad guys are really that bad, while the ones who are supposed to be good can sometimes have an ugly side to them. This is true of the movie as well, as this bunch of clichés should have been bad. Those involved probably knew it too. Stil l, a relatively unknown director has at least deflected some of the flaws with commendable camera constraint and a good dose of always-dependable eye candy.

As the conclusion that this movie is a fair movie. As you know this out-of-Hollywood movie is an action, but an Ok action. I mean the action is actually a bit low. So more cool action might improve the score of this movie. So only if you're bored you might get lighted with this action.

I saw this alleged B-level movie on a sleepless night. Although these conditions hardly qualify to say that a movie caught your attention because it was so good, I must admit I found it very intriguing, not because of its quality, but because of half its quality. I'll explain.

The strange thing about this movie is that it appears to be made in two stages, clearly distinct in cinematography, script and acting. I'm not saying it was, but it would explain why these two parts are so different.

In the "background part", the mechanics of the Justice For Victims movement are displayed, with victims and relatives lamenting the abstracted judicial system which is too lenient on perpetrators and does not care about the victims' justice. The movement's chief sets up an alternative circuit, where perpetrators are killed or "sentenced to death" so to speak, paying the killers with money financed by the victims, while some of it sticks to the hands of the movement's chief and the corrupt prison manager. This whole idea of restoring the old "eye for an eye" has been crafted very well, with sublime acting by the victims in an almost documentary fashion, and the intense characterization of the chief, whose motives are revenge, money, power and some true sense of justice altogether. It installs a double bind with the viewer, who sympathizes with the victims but struggles with the morals of revenge outside law.

The "foreground part" however, starring Rob Lowe, is your way below average stupid "escape, run and get shot at" B-movie, with only a handful of villain guards and a mole inmate running and shooting about, complete with a romantic happy end, pulling the movie away from reality entirely.

I could not help but feel that this movie was initially based on a sublime script, when half way some box office oriented but lame producer entered the scene, replaced the story writers with cheap off-shore scenarists and added a bunch of stars to turn it into an easy going action movie. It must have gone like that. How else to explain the discrepancy between the two parts?

Prisoner Rob Lowe in the Ohio State prison system for a vehicular manslaughter charge overhears a murder plot being hatched by a pair of prison guards. Little does he realize he's next on the list and the prison warden has a nice side business in getting rid of prisoners that should have gotten capital punishment.

Lowe was a professor carrying on with one of his teenage students some years back and he was intoxicated and killed her in the crash. When his wife left him after that and he went to jail he got a chance to take a good look at himself.

Still some wanted him dead and guards Jonathan Banks and Terrence Carson and fellow inmate David Flynn are ready to do the deed. But a freak mishap leaves Lowe free and looking for answers.

In this minor thriller Lowe does a good job as an almost Hitchcock like protagonist with forces arrayed against him whom he does not know and their reasons. Joe Santos is the malevolent warden and James Coburn plays a victim's rights advocate to whom this all traces back.

A decent enough if not outstanding thriller.