Risco Imediato

Action packed fast moving drama with good acting young JamesFranco, Katie Hudson and Tom Wilkinson.

A couple of Americans (Kate Hudson, James Franco) experiencing hard financial times head over to jolly old England to make a go of it. I'm pretty sure that makes no sense but we'll pretend in this fictional world that it does. So the couple are renting a room to a drug addict criminal who dies. They find a stash of money in the ceiling and, like everybody in every movie that has used this plot before, they throw common sense out the window and decide to start spending the money. Of course, some bad dudes come looking for the loot. Now the couple is in trouble and the only person who can help them is the dogged detective (Tom Wilkinson) who won't let the case go. Which is pretty much every movie detective ever. As you can see this thing is riddled with clichés and a formulaic plot. To compensate for the lack of originality we have ample doses of violence and a nice ass shot from Kate Hudson.

It's all put together adequately but it's as stale as month-old bread. Stupid people doing stupid things is the backbone of this movie. The best part is the last thirty minutes. Kate Hudson says "Guns are for pussies" because they have rigged their house Home Alone-style to fight the baddies, which is too ridiculous to miss. I love when the one criminal sees the other one impaled and asks "Are you alright?" Priceless. It's worth watching once, I suppose, if you're bored. But most people will have seen this done before and better many times over the years. There are some unintentionally funny moments, which bumps it up a notch.

Long story short - the movie definitely deserves a solid 5 in my opinion, I have no reason to go lower and to go higher neither, to be honest I would have given it a 4, if not for the graphic and well done killings on a few occasions, which I haven't seen being done in that manner for a while on the screen, but otherwise the plot was just too generic and there is no point of producing movies of this kind anymore, unless it's based on facts, or biography... Honestly how much more innovation can you bring to this particular genre, just swapping actors and changing titles endlessly only to attract dumb masses to the cinemas? I guess that's the whole point...

The creative team behind this film is definitely promising. Director Henrik Ruben Genz is the Danish film and television director, known for his film Terribly Happy (2008) and work on the series The Bridge and The Killing in the original Danish version. Kelly Masterson has signed two film scripts. Maybe I was wrong to set high expectations, because Good People is only fair, average thriller with a story seen a million of times. Tom (Franco) and Anna (Hudson) are an American couple in financial problems. They move to London to the house Tom inherited. Since their earnings are not enough for renovation so they rent a room to Ben, suspicious type. After he's gone, Tom and Anna will find the mysterious stash of more than 200,000 pounds. But as we all know big money is not without owner. And so it begins... The problem is that we have already seen that story, and Good People does not bring anything new. Even the adaptation of the novel by Marcus Sakey is kind of awkward. The dialogues are poor. Acting is not bad. Visual effects are on higher level. The pace is easy, which certainly reinforces the impression of weirdness and "suspense", although we know all too well the sequence of events. Good People is correct thriller. Watchable, but really nothing more than that.

And what is good anyway? Who defines what actions are good? Or if good people are not capable of doing bad things? And would that make them bad people? Don't get it twisted though: This is not a philosophical look at those things. If you even remotely asks those questions, it's not because the movie intended to make you think that much. It's your own perception that goes that extra mile (or two).

The movie moves along nicely, you can see almost everything coming your way and it's decent, if you're not annoyed by the standard formula this uses. It's nice to see another french actor making the move into "mainstream" Hollywood, even if he's not in it that much. Decent or a time waster, depending on your threshold