lowth2000

Fallen is a 1998 offering from Greggory Hoblit and Nicholas Kazan. The plot is loosely based on an amalgamation of Chrstian mysticism. It sees Denzel Washington locked in what appears to be a hopeless battle with a sadistic fallen Angel, Azazel.

The film starts with some promise. It has a reasonable cast with a charismatic big name star. The rest of the film does not live up to the opening. The plot seems thin and ill thought out. It drags needlessly, lacking depth or imagination.

Even with a weak plot one feels that the film could have been better. The execution was poor. A poor script eroded the films believability. The characters lacked charm and failed to interact like human beings. The dialogue was stiff and stilted. Character reactions were frequently risable. It was difficult to tell if much of the dialogue was intended to be tounge in cheek. Whether they were or they were not, they did not arouse mirth in the audience.

Likewise the direction was not strong. Whilst not as bad as the scripting it was frequently annoying. The blurred demon-cam shots were both cliche and just a pain. They were over used and therefore added little to the suspense. Likewise the audience did not really need it sign posted whenever Washington was about to be attacked.

The execution of the ending was smug. The ending was also predictable. What's more is that the audience simply do not care by the end anyway. Their seems little left to fight fore. The demon seemed undefeatable and remained so throughout the film.

This film will appeal to you if you like pseudo-religious fantasy ala Stigmata or Prophecy. It may also appeal to you if you like ghost plots. For the neutral viewer you'd probably be best to look elsewhere for an entertaining film.

By John Lowther

The plot looks involving, the cast looks strong, and the previous Jack Ryan stories to hit the big screen have been considerably above average.

The plot was never entirely believable though, it didn't sit well or work somehow. I know what your thinking, 'yeah right a terrorist attack on America pull the other one!'

It was not the scale of the attack that didn't work. Nor the idea of a terrorist attack. It was the conspiracy itself and in truth the characters who simply were not strong enough.

After the film I asked my friends for the names of various characters, the only known one was Jack Ryan himself. None of the characters were strong, not even Morgan Freeman. There seemed to be absolutely no depth to any of them, they were interchangeable and represented nothing.

The characters were not fleshed out enough. There was no depth to them. This is why the film seemed so unbelievable but more importantly it made it dull. The viewer didn't engage with the film fully because the characters lacked a human side. Some blame it on Ben Afflec's acting but I favour the explanation that he didn't get a chance to do any acting. Sure he ran about a bit, but the human relationships and basically the characters in general were not explored. The film never quite moved out of second gear.

His girlfriend was a weak character. In the other Ryan films the family element has been a source of comparison for the viewer - a link to their lives. A motivating factor that sucks people in and reifies the Ryan character. This film lacked any grounding for Ryan. He seemed to be a CIA agent and that was it. Obviously, the girlfriend sub plot was slapped in to try and ground him - however it failed. The girlfriend had little screen time, and little relevance. Ryan was not an interesting character and he seemed quite dislodged from humanity.

The bad guys were just comic. The poor characterisation of the fascists made the film less believable and retarded the excitement of the audience. That Alan Bates had to be identified as a fascist with a swastika on his watch said a lot about the subtlety on show. I would rather not have him pigeon holed like that and if he was supposed to be a neo-nazi then there were better ways of showing this. Generally Neo-Nazi's differ from the line of Hitler to some extent now, there views have changed on a lot of issues but none of this was shown. They were simply Hitler's boys. However, they didn't make sense - an international clique of nazis?!? Nazi and internationalist? Sounds as likely as a Communist CEO to me. They seemed more like lonely old men. Their motivations were largely confused and unexplored. The European pan-nationalism thing had some promise but that was mentioned once and put on the backburner. The idea of South Africa being involved confused things because they are outside of Europe, and if as Bates's Dr. Evil claimed that the point was to get all Aryans working together why plot the destruction of America? The group also had problems about the destruction of Russia. The baddies were a confused lot and the audience was left in some doubt over there motivations. Surely to afford 50 million they would have to be a powerful terrorist group? They were under developed and Bate's was seemingly in panto mode.

The film was quite dull, the characters underdeveloped. The plot was also both underdeveloped and laboured. The plot was not fleshed out with twists, turns and suspense. Whilst the end was quite suspenseful it was never genuinely a clever film. This was not brain fodder. The plot was so very predictable and without much colour. There was nothing interesting or new about it - though the production was slick enough.

A far better choice would be for all readers of this review to go and watch Dr Strangelove.

-John

ps. The ending was also very smug.

This film is rather dull. At times Hopkins' performance livens things up but frankly he isn't that well suited to an action style role. This was very similar in some ways to Enemy of The State, however, Hopkins was asked to do things they did not have Hackman doing. Essentially particularly towards the end, Hopkins was asked to pull off the incredible role of the over 60's hardman role. Hopkins at times cut an absurd figure fighting with a fit 20 year old terrorist on the outside of the car during a car chase. It was sad to see such a good actor so badly cast.

Chris Rock... don't give up the comedy! His performance wasn't great, though to be fair it was far from awfull. The material he had to work with was god awfull though and he would have really had to pull something off to make this film funny. The jokes were poor, and the characters were poorly developed (if developed at all!) so there was little in the way of character centred, situation comedy laughs. The comedy relied on tired 'I'm a nigger man' style jibes from a fast talking Chris Rock. Suffice to say it doesn't really work, and particularly not in this setting since all the other characters were so unbelievebly staight laced and humourless. The other characters bizzarely didn't even react to his jokes. All in all the humour was a let down and the film was incredulous.

The action was simply stupid and formulaic. The makes had obviously planned to get all the key components of an action film in and the plot was loosely tied around this playing to the demographics. The set ups seemed manidotry and banal, the combat ludicrous and smug, and the plot twists cringeworthy. For gods sake, at one point the CIA implanted a device under Rock's ear so they could hear everything he could - however, the tracking device they put on Rock's car was larger than a frizby -=huge=- and was so loosely clipped on the underside that it dropped off when they went over a bump in the road! the terrorists on the other hand implanted a Global Positioning system into his phone using a microchip. Oh god, I could go on, but there were so many stupid errors.

This film isn't the worst ever, however it is dull. It's crammed with ill thought out action scenes, has a very weak plot, and abjectly fails as a comedy. The comedy fails so badly that they even drop it after about an hour and a half and revert to bad action.