Thursday - Giovedì

OK,so this film is NOT very well known,and wasn't very well publicised.I discovered this fairly brutal gangster gone good movie by complete accident on one of Skys millions of movie channels late on some boring evening,but I'm glad i did!The opening sequence to this film is fantastically comical in a very dark way.This in fact sets what i think is the general tone for the movie.I think a lot of critics and movie fans that have actually seen this film have been a bit unfair to just write it off as a lower budget gangster movie in the Reservoir Dogs vein.OK,so there are undeniable similarities between Thursday and some other crime genre films that it has been compared to,but in all fairness,i think this film takes a much more darkly comic look at this type of film,and the end result is a engrossing,well made,funny,if not totally original film.Tom Jane is good in this,and deserves the recognition he will now hopefully get thanks to the The Punisher.His performance as the bad guy gone good is realistic,funny and just cold enough to make you believe Casey really was a bad ass before he reformed.Thats another thing that makes this film stand out for me,the characters.In Nicks gang you get the strangest trio of criminals ever assembled,a smooth,charismatic but very cold leader(Nick),a trigger happy blood loving sexually predatory bitch of a woman(Dallas)and a psychotic hill billy with brains with a penchant for torture(Billy Hill).Throw in the most bizarre police detective ever seen on screen,beautifully over played by Mickey Rourke,and you've got a recipe for...well for Thursday really.Its at times darkly comic,sometimes brutal,sometimes unoriginal,but always engrossing and worth watching.8/10

You may have heard of this film only in the context of the noted film critic Roger Ebert's attack on it as something that "crosses the line" when it comes to violence and offensiveness. (I'm still wondering if he and I saw the same movie at the Toronto Film Festival!)

I beg to differ with Mr. Ebert's opinion that any person with basic sensibilities will be completely offended by this film. I don't believe it necessarily pushes the limits that had been previously set by such "just as over the top" offerings as PULP FICTION and RESERVOIR DOGS. This film might suffer from the fact that it is NOT a Tarantino production, but if you like cartoonish violence, obvious stereotypes and oddball chitchat on cultural themes (Star Trek, anyone?), it will not disappoint. I went into it with no preconceptions (I bought a ticket at the last minute on the day of the 2nd screening) and was surprisingly entertained.

When i watched this movie i had no idea what it was about, and i had never heard of it before. But i must say i was positively surprised. The first few minutes are almost the most funny of the whole movie. The store clerk from India is just too funny! Anyways, the story isn´t really too much to talk about, but i think it´s ok. The acting on the other hand is quite good, and still the only actor i recognized was Mickey Rourke who wasn´t really in the movie until the ending. And the ending is where the turn-off is i think, it´s not bad but i don´t feel like it really ends. I feel like there should have been something more. A final battle in some way. I don´t know. All in all, this was a good movie and i recommend it to anyone into Tarantino-type movies with loads of violence and dark, sinister humor! I rate it 7/10.

I hadn't seen this movie for years. I saw it the other night, and realized just how frickin' entertaining it really was. The likable Jane gives a true meaning to the word reformed. Now a talented architect, his past catches up with him, in the form of his ex partner in crime (Eckhart) This Thursday is hell day for him. Eckhart, who at the start, can't decide which coffee to have, and the female cashier is Indian, so you know what that means, marks a great ambiguous start to Pulp Fiction'ish flick. Unlike Jane, Eckhart hasn't changed his tune, and brings down a tonne load of trouble on Jane, making this Thursday, the worst one he's ever had. After Eckhart takes Jane's loaner car out, Jane's day gets worse quick, when trouble keeps coming through his door, some of his visitors, including hottie Prosnokova (where has she been all these years?) are real nasty and unbalanced pieces of work. She delivers a real sexy performance, and a sexy telling of her experiences when watching lesbo porn, where James Le Gross, is just outright sick, the sickest one. Plummer's fun, as wannabe Jamaican rap artist/drug dealer and in this case, hit-man too. He's very generous when it comes to sharing his gunja, where Jeter's impelling as Jane's marriage adviser, whatever. Even bad apple detective (Rourke) makes an entrance, with a severed head in a box no less. Be prepared, Thursday has some pretty heavy shock violence, but it's very unrealistic too. Thursday has something going for it though, where this owes a lot to it's characters in their good performances, especially Prosnokova. It's short sharp sweet, and never boring, and Jane is great as the lead, where 84 minutes couldn't be better spent at the video shop. Slick, it is, as the way it ends, with the underused Paula Marshall, as Jane's girlfriend. Thursdays have never been more exciting. For Jane fans. especially.

This movie almost doesn't try hard to be serious at all, but it is, and it's a pretty damn good flick. This role seems to be made for Thomas Jane. If you didn't see the beginning sequence, you could definitely believe that his character, Casey, is just a hapless and dull husband. This assumption is a tribute to Thomas Jane's range. He is utterly convincing as both a sweet and seemingly dull-witted house-husband, as well as a cold, swaggering badass with that thousand-yard stare. Throw in some crazy plot twists involving his ex-partner and a grotesquely malformed Mickey Rourke (sporting a slimy, perverted version of his once-great pompadour) and you've got yourself a good action-thriller.