The Engineer

Supposed true tale "The Engineer" shoulda been topical & interesting, but its production standards (under director Danny A Abeckaser), writing (Kosta Kondilopoulos) & acting are SO bad it fails completely. In 1995 Yahya Ayyash (Adam Haloon) masterminded horrific Hamas terrorist bombings across Israel - so was hunted in Gaza by Shin Bet agents (led by Emile Hirsch (of the tanked career)) and an ex-Mossad hit squad (led by Angel Bonanni - funded by US Sentaor Robert Davi who wants to personlly kill Ayyash to avenge his daughter who died in the attacks (true story huh?)). This cheap, pitiful tosh is certainly NOT another "Zero Dark Thirty".

This doesn't have the script, direction or acting quality of "Fauda". It's very slow in the beginning and bogs down at times. They should have used Hebrew and Arabic throughout with English subtitles instead of jumping between three languages. It improves toward the end.

The insertion of "family drama" turns this from an interesting story to another boring American type police/family drama. I don't care about their family relationships, I turned in to watch a Shin Bet/Sabak operation to find a bomber. There is a reason that Fauda is popular in many countries including Arab ones, it has quality.

Wow this sounded interesting but what a let down. This movie has Robert Davi and that's it. Everything else about it has the look and feel of a bad student film. Absolutely ridiculous. A complete embarrassment to the entertainment industry. The direction is just awful and most of the acting, Robert Davi excluded, is dreadful. And not even fun and campy bad. Unwatchable bad. Coulda been a good movie but it isn't. Effects, direction, even the score is a joke. Without question one of the worst movies I have ever seen and possibly the worst movie I've seen. Zero chemistry between the characters and a cast of stereotypes right out of central casting.

I love Emile Hirsch and he was outstanding in Into The Wild, Lone Survivor and Alpha Dog...but this film was so poorly done and characters were not cast appropriately. Emile looked like a fish out of water trying to portray this character. I would expect so much more from him because I know he's talented. The acting was some of the worst, most lackluster and boring that I've seen to date. I could not even finish the movie. I fell asleep halfway through and I never fall asleep watching movies. Poorly filmed, poorly directed, poorly executed. This story had potential to be interesting and gripping .... but it failed miserably. I would not recommend.

After just finished watching pretty much the exact same filmmakers and cast in the Inside Man that was very impressive for an indie production, this film does a 180 and was shockingly a huge mess. I'm a fan of "based on true events" films, especially when they are filmed effectively like Inside Man which was done right for an indie B-film, but sadly this wasn't one of those. The entire normally comfortable 92 min runtime dragged on and on endlessly, with horrible pacing, lackluster direction that made even the few action scenes boring, and a story that was choppy and convoluted. It's hard to believe it was the same writers and directors that made both films, as they are night and day. It's too bad, this had promise, but it just failed to deliver the goods.