Oxygen

Oxygen is a made for Cinemax thriller that does a one up on the thriller genre. This film is about the acting. It does what most other thrillers and films stay away from, the performances. A cop (Maura Tierney) with some very dark secrets is on the trail of a kidnapper (Adrien Brody) who buried a rich woman (Laila Robins) alive in the New York woods. This is a cat and mouse thriller from beginning to end. Adrien Brody is fantastic as a the sick, obsessed with Harry Houdini kidnapper. His acting is so real it's like he's not even trying. He's cunning, cleaver, smart and sick all at the same time. It's drama to the end. He really needs to be cast as the villain in more films. Put him in an action film and bring a whole new level to the word terrorist. Maura Tierney best know for her stint on Newsradio and Jim Carrey's ex-wife in Liar, Liar is just spectacular. She pulls off the cop with more than just problems. She beautiful, tough and confused. Throughout a lot of the film she's in tears. She can act and be tough. Get her some scripts, I wanna see this girl more often. The supporting cast is also great and each brings realism to their performances. Even though this film has dark characters and a dark subject matter, the film is very light looking. The brightness of the film will grab from the start. The colors stand out and are hardly missed. The film has a action flick look but it's a thriller. It's a different mix that works extremely well. Oxygen is an well acted thriller that will drain you. I highly recommend that all should run and check this one out. It's very high on the must see meter.

Good performances, especially from Adrien Brody as a psychotic sadistic killer with a Houdini obsession and Maura Tierney as a cop, make this film stand out. The story is good, but would have suffered in the hands of a less competent director and cast. This is a movie that depends a lot on performance to deliver, and it does. Some of the supporting cast could have been played by better actors, but they are serviceable and are mostly meant to occasionally prod the story along another notch. On the whole, the cast stays out of the way of Brody and Tierney, who are the whole show. It's definitely worth seeing, and another one of those films that seemingly came out of nowhere, as I never heard of it before. I like solid B movies, and this stands out as one of the best. Its obscurity helps to conceal its surprises, and it helps to be surprised with this movie. I gave it an 8 out of 10.

This made for TV psychological crime thriller exceeded my expectations. The story begins with the abduction of a rich wife for ransom. She is buried alive and her abductor sets about collecting the ransom for the location of her grave. However, this is really not the story but only the set up. The real story is about what happens after he is caught as the police and the FBI race against time to get him to reveal where she's buried.

Our sociopathic villain, known to us only as Harry (after his idol Harry Houdini) is well prepared for the psychological cat and mouse game that follows as he had planned what he would do if he were caught. The result is an effective (though often superficial) contest of psychological one upsmanship between Harry (Adrien Brody) and our heroine police detective, Madeline (Maura Tierney).

The story has some noticeable plot flaws for a film that is attempting to be a serious crime drama. Certain elements of Harry's escape attempts are implausible. Much of the dialogue between the police officers and FBI agents was inane drivel that made them look like idiots. There are other problems later in the story involving the buried wife that are also troubling. These are not enough, however, to mar an otherwise well crafted plot.

I was most impressed by the photography, not just the look of the film, but the way the images presented themselves. Director Richard Shepard used the camera very creatively, using objects in foreground and background to dramatize certain images. There was an excellent shot of Madeline's reflection seen in extreme close-up in Harry's eye. The handheld chase scenes made you feel like you were running behind the action. This is a level of directing that is not normally seen on TV. The whole film had a very raw, real look. Things were dirty and disorganized, just like in real life rather than being carefully and symmetrically placed.

The acting ranged from fair to excellent. The cops and the husband were generally pretty mediocre with moments of nausea. Maura Tierney was good but didn't have the range to play Madeline effectively. Madeline's character required a combination of tormented, pathetic self abuser and case hardened cop. Tierney was outstanding at the tormented side, but came across as tentative and flaccid as the cop (which was the greater part of the role).

The best performance comes from Adrian Brody as Harry. He was wry and unsophisticated while being just close enough to the edge to keep you guessing if he was cunning or just a psychopath. He played the part with sarcastic disdain, as if the character thought he was smarter than he really was, which indeed was the case.

Terry Kinney's character, Madeline's cop husband Tim, didn't give him much to work with. He was a wimpy whining loser. Kinney did an adequate job at this portrayal.

I rated this movie 7/10. For those who enjoy a psychological crime thriller, it won't disappoint.

More articulate people than myself have said it all; but I'll have a go anyway :) Oxygen is a tightly paced and utterly watchable thriller about a female detective (Maura Tierney) on the trail of a psychopathic kidnapper (Adrian Brody) and his buried-alive victim, while fighting demons of her own. The 2 leads are both astonishing. Maura Tierney is SO beautiful and SO talented it's almost indecent :) She has such a thoughtful / intelligent face and completely captivated me with her role in Liar Liar. She's just as good in this movie too. Bruce Almighty might have been half decent if MS Tierney had played the role Jennifer Aniston so completely messed up!! Adrien Brody is another fantastically talented actor yet to get the 'star' status he deserves. He was brilliant in The Pianist and he's brilliant here too. His character was very very scarey. So. Well worth watching.

In OXYGEN, Richard Shepard has refined his approach to character-driven crime thrillers first seen in his previous, also excellent film, MERCY. Armed with experience and a bigger budget, Shepard has wrested outstanding performances from Maura Tierney and Adrien Brody, in their best work to date. Both characters are quite believable, and their defects are gently extracted and displayed by the subtle script. There are no stereotypes or one-dimensional characters in the whole film.

This is not to say that this is some esoteric, art-house movie, suitable only for clove-smoking turtleneck-wearers. The action scenes are well-executed and edited. Camera work is very nice; the long Steadicam shot in the train is especially memorable. Tension holds on throughout, and even the asides (such as an FBI agent's humorous soliloquy about the death penalty) integrate well and don't distract.

I sure would like to see what Richard Shepard could do if given some Really Big Bucks.