The Postcard Killings

A quite good and cool movie, but.... Famke Jansen .... Whats had she Done with her face ???? She was so beautiful but now ... she is unrecognizable !!!

It is however fun to see my hometown Stockholm in the movie !

This was an intense serial killer film and it died on entry and then kept dying. Bad acting from start to finish. Constantly you can tell they cut scenes. It was so choppy. Then they have loud emotional crying from both main characters, but they never developed the characters enough to believe or care they are hurt. Horrible acting horrible script.

This was such a great idea for a movie, but they killed it.

Just so much of it didn't gel. Morgan's acting for one. There are some unbelievably hammy scenes. Did he not learn to summon an authentic sense memory to trigger a convincing cry?

As a whole, the movie also could have been more cinematic. The scale seems small for being set in half-a-dozen countries. And that doesn't so the adaptation justice.

A lot of this comes across as a decent episode of a procedural show. That is the overall feel. The execution could have been so much better since the source material and story appear to have some interesting elements.

A random night in and looking for inspiration of something to watch. Amazon were pushing this acquisition of theirs with some banner advertising and I decided to give it a go. It's an OK redux of "Se7en" that passed an evening, but nothing more.

When his daughter is killed whilst on honeymoon in London, Jacob Kanon (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), a veteran detective from New York, pushes his way into the investigation. He discovers that their murder is one of a string across Europe's capital cities, with each pair of victims mutilated and staged like a classical artwork. The murderer is also sending a postcard to a local journalist ahead of each killing to announce their arrival. In Stockholm, Kanon manages to get to the reporter, Dessie Lombard (Cush Jumbo), before the murder takes place.

Adapted from the James Patterson novel, the film has a decent enough storyline to build around. You'll probably be ahead of who is committing the murders before the film reveals it, but that's OK as it's not really a whodunnit, more a why and will they be captured-unnit. Performances are OK. Morgan does well enough as the lead, nobody else is particularly asked to do that much heavy lifting. Famke Janssen has to do some of the investigation back in the States opposite Denis O'Hare, who shows up in a typical Denis O'Hare type role.

The trouble is, it's all been done before and better in other films, even TV series have the capacity now to be as gory and country hopping as this is. It just doesn't have any particular elements that elevate it beyond the passable stage. Also, as a European myself, it's got some pretty laughable ideas about how policing works over here, bear in mind we're in major capital cities here, not small towns. Kanon seems staggeringly unable to comprehend why the other officers won't let the father of one of the victims into the crime scenes and allow him to handle evidence. He then sticks a map of Europe to his bedroom wall and circles London and Madrid and draws a straight line between them, that'll tell him loads.

I didn't think it was as terrible as some other seem to have, but it's certain derivative and mundane and I doubt I'll remember it at all in a couple of weeks.

This film wasn't that bad, but with very little rework, could've been much better.

The main issue was the amateur screenplay put together by the novel's author, Liza Marklund, and newb writer Andrew Stern. Had a seasoned screenwriter proofread and edited the script, this film would've been impressive.

The 104 min runtime dragged on with terribly slow pacing. This film should've had the pacing sped up and/or the writing cut down to about 85-90 mins max.

Directing by Danis Tanovic was adequate, except for the annoying fade-ins to out-of-focus dizzying shots. The cinematography was decent however, and the score quite fitting. Casting and performances were on point, particularly from Morgan.

This film isn't much of a who-done-it, as we find out underwhelmingly half way through, but more of an international chase, of which also ended as underwhelming, with a silly final scene.

Still, not as bad as the critics say it is. I still enjoyed it, and it's a generous 7/10 from me.