Angli: The Movie

Considering the money shortage they had to work with and that I've seen big budgeted movies which weren't better than this one I decided to give it a five.

There where though some serious goofs that with some minor attention could have been avoided, let's take the first scene for instance. Not even the Incredible Hulk could have had the strength to keep suspended a ten year old girl sitting on a chair just by holding a thin rope she was tied to with only one hand and at the same time chat calmly with one of the Angli. Moutain climbers should hire his services I think. Another blemish, when there was the closeup shot of the rope in question, this (the rope) wasn't straight showing it was being stretched.

Another thing which really annoyed me in this movie was the huge amount of adverts it contained, at times it was more like seeing a two hour shopping-ad rather than a movie.

I will not comment on special effects as these cost money to do which the producers hadn't much. I still hope to see more local productions like this one though cause "practice makes perfect" as the English say. Only by experimenting more will Maltese cinematography improve.

This must definitely rate as the worst movie I have ever seen. The reason I'm saying this is that the producers didn't get anything right - the colours severely lacked saturation and the contrast was high (also some explosions were in 256 colour, looking as fake as it gets), the acting was awful (the actors lacked passion "sparawli l'ohti!/they shot my sister!" as if nothing happened), the sound was horrible (at several points the sound is not even synchronised with the video, and it has split second sound losses every now and then), the story was broken and the adverts were in-your-face and all over the place.

This movie is supposed to be a thriller, but really it ends up becoming a comedy because it is so awful. It is just a pitiful excuse for some revenue coming from people eagerly awaiting Malta's debut movie.

This is the cheesiest film of all time. I regret having even given it a chance. I want those two hours or so of my life back. It embarrasses me. They don't have any idea how to make a good film. They thought that to make a good film it is all about spending lots of money to make it and being all technologically up to date and not going cheap. There is no point in making this film, what a waste of time, my toilet is deeper than this. I mean even the sheer lack of imagination and bad taste. And the Maltese don't speak English with that stupid accent, they only do so when they want to impress foreigners. John Montanaro is an old friend of mine and I always thought he had a wonderful sense of humour, i was always impressed by how clever his jokes were and how he always managed to keep a straight face when saying them, so i am sure inside while playing his role in this farce he is cracking up but would do anything to have his moment of fame, he is such a narcissist. The Maltese are so obsessed with living it up, living it flash and classy, even if they boast their religious faith. The Maltese hamalli, low life capitalists that they are, rich Arabs from The South of Europe and the North of Africa with a mentality trying to live the American dream. They would take a shot of an elegant car(I recognized it from when the Queen was here on that commonwealth occasion) with the use of a crane and maybe they would do it quite well but for no apparent reason whatsoever. A sheer lack of ideas all the way through. This film just gets worse and worse till i did not even know what I was looking at anymore. And how sad to use Fort St Elmo again after it was used for 'Midnight Express', what was he thinking? That it would make his film somewhat good? And enough of these Van Damme type movies for crying out loud, there never was a good one anyway. I could make/direct a better film with my eyes closed.

I went to see this movie with great reluctance. I had seen the trailer and it looked like some cheap excuse for a film with stupid dialogue, bad acting and very bad special effects, and probably some poor excuse for a plot.

So it was with some surprise that as soon as the film started, it had gripped me, probably with the dramatic effect of a realistic and unfortunately not too uncommon episode of a life-and-death situation in a cop's life. True, the acting, dialogue, plot and special effects were poor in the extreme. But the plot was no different that a hundred other crime thrillers that Hollywood releases each year. As for the special effects, the explosions looked like they were taken straight off some video game from your 15-year old computer. And, it was the first time that I could tell that the film was shot in digital as I could actually see the pixels. But still, there was one particular car chase that ended up with a nice car aerial somersault that was clearly shot live with no CGI. For a debuting film industry, it was pretty impressive.

Some of the fight sequences were admittedly laughable. In fact I could not help laughing out loud in the theatre at the unexpected entrance of Agent Mark Möller in a grocer to the rescue of our supposed cop hero in a hold-up, putting the criminal to shame with some kung fu style moves. But this was actually intended to be funny anyway.

So I would give this movie a deserved 7 out of 10 for some good entertainment, hoping that in the future the Maltese film makers focus more on the plot and the acting rather than on cheap explosions and special effects. After all, they did show that they have some good ideas, it was just their execution that was not good enough. They should take the example of some other foreign low-budget movies.

OK so it's funny, really funny. but the problem is it's supposed to be an action driven crime thriller! Bad narrative has been played out by possibly, the worst possible group of actors, apart from poor Mike Moller of course, who's name in the film funnily enough happens to be Mike Moller. The special effects make those in 1980 look futuristic, I mean it was a low budget production, but surely from all the advertising in the film they could have scraped enough money together to buy a mid range mac and some half decent special effects program for it, not the 486 using corel draw that it appears to use. I'd also like to point out that i get a better quality picture from my JVC camcorder when i use decent lighting, than they managed with their 'professional equipment'.