Filha de Deus

About the only thing wrong with this film is the title; it is terrible. It should have been called the Daughter of God, which was a perfect title, not some lame generalist title, that was PC and not meant to offend various churches and church officials (none of whom would get this film, anyway). Other than that, the film is almost perfect, and I am a very demanding and cynical critic, who also happens to be an agnostic taoist. So, it would have been a piece of cake for me to pan this film like the vast majority of others (most probably for religious reasons), but I base my critiques on scripts (this one was great), character development (this film did a great job with that as well), direction and cinematography (once again, the film was almost impeccable), and some of the finest work ever done by Keanu Reeves, an actor with several hits as well as a few misses in the past. Why any unbiased movie critic would pan this film is beyond me. See it for yourself and then decide if the film captures Washington Heights, where I once lived. It recaptured it for me. It avoided needless chase scenes and mindless violence (unless it was germane to the plot), It is a multi-layered film, in the mold of Serpico and Donnie Brasco, rather than a mindless "action cop" film, which is probably why so many mediocre critics panned it. Mindless under-30s, who have no concept of film composition or complexity of a screenplay. They are not critics; they are wanna-be Hollywood formula addicts, and this film does not conform to their formulas. Forget about the other ratings; see the movie and decide for yourself.

2 stories here. Firstly, Reeves plays a cop investigating the killing of his corrupt partner and secondly De Armas is a deeply religious woman living with her husband's close knit Dominican family whilst awaiting his return from serving in Iraq. At the beginning of the film, waiting for a train she has the first of several bizarre visions.

Whilst there are one or two points of interest here and De Armas is as good as ever, this is a directionless mess of a film which simply makes no sense whatsoever. Add to this that it is all pretty boring and that at the end it just stops, resolving nothing and you have the makings of a truly dire production.

Of interest however, there is some controversy around this film. The producers, Lionsgate, were apparently expecting a standard Keanu Reeves cop thriller (presumably they decided not to read the script) and when they saw the original film, called 'Daughter of God', they had a seizure and recut the thing into the shambles we have today as 'Exposed'.

I have not seen 'Daughter of God', but by all accounts it is a flawed, but fairly coherent story of a woman and her beliefs with the cop element being a key but secondary element of the story. I do not doubt that there are films out there that producers have restored to masterpieces and which went on to make box office gold, this though seems to be another classic tale of producers misunderstanding what they were getting / had and just turned what they had into total rubbish. What a waste, because when you analyse the nonsense you've seen, you can detect sparks of what it might have been.

So as I was about to post this review, I noticed on the trivia page notes on exactly what went wrong with this film, cause something did go terribly wrong on this one, terribly wrong.

The movie felt like one or two different movies, intertwined together really badly. The whole thing was all over the place with no real focus.

It's really sad because the acting in the movie was really good and I love how the filmmakers placed the movie in the Inwood section of Manhattan. I recognize the area and it made the movie feel so real. Like with the characters going naturally back and forth from Spanish to English, it fells like Dominican New York. Not only that, but the cinematography and the sound design really helps to put you right there on the streets. From the sounds of the buses and cars going by to parts where it was cloudy and raining. I really felt I was on those streets and not in a theater.

Plus Big Daddy Kane makes a rare acting appearance. How can this movie not be solid gold?

Well apparently it was not enough for the studios to have Keenu Reeves on the poster to sell tickets, they had to re-edit the movie to make sure he was more the star of the pic, and this puts everything off, because you still realize that Reeves' role as a detective trying to solve his crooked partner's murder is a small piece of a movie about a a young devoted catholic living with her husband's family while he's overseas, trying to wrap her head around deeply distributing issues that are triggered by her own connection to the this cop's murder.

So I herd that there is a director's cut of the movie. If that cut every comes to light, I would want to see what the filmmaker really was trying to do, but do not waste your time seeing this cut.

Difficult movie to watch overall. Was waiting for this to tie together in a satisfying way, but it never happened. Think they were shooting for film noir M Knight hybrid but not even sure anymore after the ending.

A woman leaves a nightclub and, over the objections of her brother-in-law, insists on taking the subway home alone. On the train platform she witnesses an incredible event: an overly well-dressed man with a decidedly albino cast to his features walks on air and levitates above the subway track, peering down the tunnel to see if the train is arriving. He turns, walks back to the platform, and smiles at the woman.

The next day, a crooked police officer is found dead in the same subway station, and one by one, all the associates of the woman disappear or are murdered. She herself begins to witness surreal visions which increase in frequency when she befriends a small girl she suspects to be a victim of sexual abuse.

This movie had the makings of an intriguing plot, as the story expands and we learn more about the various characters and how they are, or may be, related. Unfortunately, the makings of a plot do not equal a plot itself, and this is never more so the case than when the studio edits the film to try to create suspense and mystery that should have been inherent in the original screenplay. The endless flashbacks, vision sequences, and out-of-chronology scenes add nothing to the film but confusion and, oddly enough, tedium. They take a better-than-average premise and turn it into a mess of a movie, saved primarily by the few nuggets of genuine creativity in the plot and the looks and acting of Ana de Armas and the cast who portray her family members.

I gave this film 6 stars, solely because I felt the current consensus of 4.2 is absurdly low. A realistic rating would be in the 5.2 to 5.5 range, in my opinion. As the film is only 90 minutes, you won't waste much time watching it if you happen to disagree.