The Maker

Quirky intelligent little tale of a boy choosing between his foster parents' dream of college and his older brother's exciting life of crime. A lot of fun funky little touches. Pacing is slow, but it's quite interesting.

For the most part, the only things that brought me through the whole film are that it was very difficult to get the loan of a copy of the film via interlibrary loan, and it has Rhys Meyers (as he spelled it for this film) in it, who is always nice to look at. Although there is a good premise for an interesting film and story, there was not enough continuity and plot development to keep me interested and engaged. There were a number of subplots and minor characters which and who really didn't add anything of value to the story. I think that if you are a fan of Rhys-Myers or Modine, you may want to see the film in order to get to see them in an unreleased-for-theaters film, but otherwise, it really isn't work your time or trouble. If you're planning to enjoy looking at Rhys-Myers' skin, you can do a lot better with some of his other work. Tangled may not be an excellent film, either, but he drops his pants for you in it, and that is worth something you won't get out of "The Maker."

The film is about two brothers who lost contact with each other during their teenage years. The younger brother Josh, live a messy but rather okay life, he hang out with his friends, doing silly things. At Josh 18th birthday his long lost brother comes home... I leave the rest for you to find out.

I think it's a kind of messy movie, it really doesn't tell a story. Not a good story anyway. You can almost figure out quite fast how things are. The acting in the movie was decent, Josh wears the same expression on his face during 99% of the film.

My advice to you, watch it if you're really bored.

Josh is turning 18 and hanging out with a bad crowd. They do drugs, drive recklessly and even steal from the U. S. Mail. His brother Walter has been gone for a while and he comes back hoping to make amends for leaving the family. Josh has what seems like a brother-sister relationship with Bella, but he really wants Emily, a cop who is several years older.

Josh's parents died when he was very young, and he was adopted by the Minnells. Walter (who has gone back to his original name Schmeiss) knows the full story, which Josh has never heard, and what happened to them may explain why both brothers turned out the way they did.

'The Maker' is the one who makes the rules in a given situation. Josh has that opportunity when he helps Walter and Felice in their 'transfer and storage' business.

I think of the pleasant character from 'What the Deaf Man Heard' when I think of Matthew Modine. However, he can play bad guys too, and he made Walter likable and not really evil. As a con artist, Walter had to be quite a good actor too. I thought most of the lead actors gave good performances. Still, the movie was quite dark at times, and somewhat violent toward the end. Jonathan Rhys-Meyers effectively showed a young man having to make important moral decisions as he reached a point where he could have gone down the wrong road.

It was a worthwhile film, if you like this sort of thing.

If ever I need to renew my enthusiasm about current filmmaking, a film featuring the talents of Mary Louise Parker is a pretty good place to start. Her part in this film is as a supporting character, and the few scenes in which she appears and fleshes out the kindly but down to earth police officer underline how this film's best parts unfortunately don't add up to a good movie.

The leads are good (Rhys-Meyers is a talent to watch, Balk has always interested me and if Modine just sat and dribbled, I know he could make it look rivetting), the script contains some nice character exchanges, the camera work has some nice touches, and director Tim Hunter puts effort into giving the film some unexpected lift (such as sitting a crim at a desk on open ground beside an airport runway, and getting the art department to set up a backyard breakfast patio of white picket fence and red flowers under the threatening gaze of power lines.)

But although it started well, in the end, this is too many good individual stories fighting with each other instead of making a coherent whole. Any one of the various plot lines could've held their own. At film's end, the script has to literally shoot its way out of the entwined mess its in to reach a conclusion. Maybe this goes down well on cable. I think a viewer, whether sitting in a cinema, or in his own home, is entitled to better.