Muzzle

I have never reviewed a film before, but felt compelled to do so after giving this a watch.

I saw the previews and was excited to sit down and watch...unfortunately, the best part of the movie was the trailer. Eckhart did his best with what he had to work with, but it there were so many forced scenes it was distracting. Beyond that, while the story is pretty linear, scene to scene seems to leave out a lot of information in regards to character development and development of friendships when seemingly there was none.

This is definitely a watch it once film. In the hands of a capable director and producer this could have been excellent.

I must say that I absolutely loved this movie.

It was very heartbreaking and as a canine lover, just shows the true love between a dog and their human.

I love the interactions between the dog and owner and how it just shows that there are no bad animals, just bad owners.

I think it sends a very good message to the public. And should be embraced and shared. My dog watched it with me and she got very sad.

Don't know why some bad reviews.

An absolute wonderful heartfelt caring movie. I cannot fault it at all.

I will encourage anyone who loves animals to take the time and watch this gem. You will never be the same.

IN A NUTSHELL: The story is about a cop whose canine partner gets killed in the line of duty. After losing his dog, Jake Rosser plummets deep into a sinister underworld to uncover the truth about who may be responsible.

The film was directed by John Stalberg Jr, who also wrote it with Carlyle Eubank.

THINGS I LIKED: I've been a fan of Aaron Eckhart for years, and I usually like all of his movies, so I was interested in seeing this one. The movie is a study that shows how both his character and the dog are muzzled by past traumas.

I also really like Stephen Lang as an actor. His characters always look like they have a long story to tell about their background.

The movie shows a very ugly side of what's happening in America now. The streets are filled with homeless people in tents surrounded by garbage and worse things. The story takes place in Los Angeles which, sadly, has turned into a complete dumpster fire of a city.

The color palette of the film is dirty and grimy, perfectly representing the filthy underworld the movie is about.

You'll learn some German words because cops speak to their canine partners in German! I've heard that German Shepherds are one of the smartest dogs.

There is a suspenseful scene with some action that utilizes very interesting camera angles. Well done.

The ending is really sweet.

THINGS I DIDN'T LIKE: The love interest is odd. The woman is a nurse with her own set of emotional baggage, so it's weird that she would be interested in an infamous, violent cop who has shown zero warmth toward her when they first met. She basically throws herself at him, vanishes for the majority of the story, and then shows up at the end of the movie with almost no more interaction with the cop.

The final villain looked like a cartoon character.

TIPS FOR PARENTS: Profanity, including F-bombs We see prostitutes, crazy people, and druggies on the streets An explosion kills people Violence Blood A variety of weapons are used Cigarettes and alcohol use We see people get killed in various ways.

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This movie only starts to become really suspenseful, gripping and action packed after some 45 minutes, so beware the real rewarding suspenseful part of this movie is only firing up during the second half.

But this movie has enough to offer in the first 45 minutes as well, because everything (direction, photography, editing, soundscore, dialogues, characters) are of SOLID quality. I really appreciate it so much to see a movie like this, made with an abundance of craftmanship.

The first 45 minutes are firstmost a subtle character portrait of an introvert, aggressive cop (terrific role by Aaron Eckhart), struggling with his inner demons. When his dog gets shot he desperately wants to find the dogkiller, but while investigating he stumbles upon the most dangerous drug cartel.

Slow start, bleak and supsenseful final. Terrific acting performance by Aaron Eckart. Solid direction.

Probably best suited for an arthouse movie audience, because this is defnitely NOT a fastpaced gungho action picture, but much more a slowburning, psychological character portrait of a cop, struggling with his inner demons.

The film story is pretty good apart from a pretty odd and under-sketched villain, but what is distracting is the poor quality of the dialogue.

It's a combination of badly recorded dialogue, likely with a lack of options, and amateur use of dialogue cleanup software.

In this case, ADR would have been better to replace the bad parts.

ADR is replacing on set dialogue with new dialogue recorded later in a studio or custom spaces to replicate sets after the film has been shot. If ADR isn't done well, it sounds terrible. The actor has to be good at it, and importantly, the dialogue sound engineer needs to know how to deal with it to make it sound like it was recorded in the environment we see on film.

For a feature, it's a time consuming process and you have to pay the actors more, so perhaps they didn't have the money for it on this film?

Sometimes directors don't like ADR, which is common. In this instance, hire a better sound recordist!

To explain the 'lack of options' term above, there are usually at least 2 microphones used to record actors lines. One is the boom which is often suspended over the actors heads, the other is the Lav which is hidden on the actors body as close to the mouth as possible.

Sometimes sound recordists stuff up Lav mic placement and all you get is scrapes and bumps from the clothes ribbing on the mic and the Lav recording becomes mostly unusable. You are then left with only the boom mic recording.

In noisy environments, boom mics can pick up as much background sound as dialogue, which is a pain and hard to edit. Here, digital audio cleanup software comes into play, and gets used to remove the background noise. If digital cleanup is done badly, you get the kind of dialogue quality which is present within too many shots in this film.