À la poursuite du manuscrit sacré : La Quête de la vérité

It's strawberry cotton candy. You'll have a few laughs - two surprising ones. There are a few serious notes, but no tears. It's fun and harmless. Which isn't a bad way to spend an hour or so in these times.

On a scale of Stana's projects the writing here isn't as good as Sister Cities and nowhere near as good as the best of Castle. The writing and just about everything else is better than The Librarian thing she did.

It's a nice if trite story well told with decent actors mostly in Jordan on a small budget. Production values are modest and good. The camera work and score are very nice. Direction and editing are well above average.

It's a movie version of the school essay about what I did on my vacation.

Wow, this was not what I expected from Stana Katic. The main 'plot' of the movie seems to be how many scenery shots they can get of the Middle East. Although beautiful, that's most of the movie, with a little story thrown in as an afterthought.

The story itself was dull and extremely predictable. It's like it was written by a fourth-grader that wants to be a playwright some day.

It also felt a Lot like Castle in tone. All they needed was Fillion, better writing, and it could have been a Castle movie.

At least in this, Raza Jaffrey couldn't act his way out of a box (which would have been more interesting to see). Even Katic's performance was stiff and almost emotionless.

Except for the panoramic views, it was just plain terrible.

I saw a half decent rating for this film so I decided to watch. Within the first 20 minutes I realized how terribly silly this film was. It is as if a bunch of children put together a story. Our heroes wake up after being captured and are confronted with a seven-year-old child holding a gun and keeping watch on the prisoners. You must be kidding me. Confrontation with the adults includes slapstick, jokey comedy that doesn't work at all. Still held at gunpoint, our heroine first insists that she doesn't know or care about her fellow captive. Then a moment later she seems to care. The ridiculous miraculous escape (or there wouldn't be a movie) is so contrived as to wonder what the director was thinking. Was he trying to make a movie like The Mummy? It certainly wasn't working. At all.

The look of the film is ok. It seems like an attempt to take advantage of a foreign city. And it's exactly like what other reviewers describe - an airy adventure tour of a city in Jordan. The dialogue, acting and especially the script is extremely amateurish. If you want to take a tour of Amman and value your time, there are plenty of other documentaries that will do the job effectively.

Rachel goes to Jordan to identify her brother's body, there she is involved in a religious mystery with help of us agent, Jake. They get kidnapped, wander through the dessert, and of course, people whom seem like friends are really enemies.

FINAL VERDICT: OK, reminded me of Romancing the Stone except this takes place in the dessert and it is not as good. OK for a background movie while you do other things.

This movie is way too hard to believe any of it. Surviving and kidnaping in the desert like that--ridiculous. The plot also hard to believe

But the scenes of the desert, of Petra, of the Mid-East--very interesting