battisti

When you get experienced enough as a filmmaker and you learned most of the tricks of the trade, you realise that the best thing to do for an art-house director is to stick mindlessly to whatever made you successful with the festival-going crowd and the film critics earlier. Never mind that you have no new ideas and that the most your film does is deliver the 'good old feeling' everyone expects.

That's a fate Kaurismaki seems not to have been able to avoid with his Lights in the Dusk. Totally devoid of ANY new or creative ideas with respect to what we have seen from him before, Kaurismaki's feature recycles his lately trademark - and otherwise very appealing - darkish, yet basically cheerful coloured backgrounds and surroundings behind and around the actors. But the story is the most feeble ever... No real suspense, only mindless clichés about a totally hapless main character (no, this is not irony on the film's part, guys, this is just the 'good-old-Kaurismaki-feeling' we yearn for and it only seems to work because his other films were enjoyable on their own). Plus some sentimental music tossed in (who would have expected that from Kaurismaki? ;), without the real possibility for the viewer to relate to the characters (you feel no sorry, no empathy, only anger at most about how incapable they are).

And finally, even at about 75 minutes, this movie is waaaay longer than it should be: another sign of running out of fresh ideas. Hey Aki, you'd better take a rest and come back with something that's more up to your standards. And my advice for the potential viewer: watch the other parts of the trilogy (The Man Without a Past, 2002; Drifting Clouds, 1996), and skip this one.

If you like to watch (in the end) overtly sentimental dramas with average acting (pace other reviews) and with a storyline that doesn't exactly require a genius to compound, you will have a great time watching this movie. The plot is somewhat dull and way too familiar from other crime/heist flicks, except for one sole twist in it, while the music is totally conventional (by American standards), at points reminding of second-class thrillers without any real chance of creating suspense (and in fact this is more a drama-cum-crime flick than anything else). At the end sequence it really felt like watching a watered-down Brazilian soap-opera episode (i.e. it really wasn't as sentimental as it could have been). On the positive side, Um Tiro... has real smooth, Hollywood-style camera-work, but, even here, you will not find nothing out of the ordinary. And routine visuals cannot make up for what the film lacks in depth and imagination.