Starts better than it ends, but overall quite good
This wonderfully ingenious mystery is one of the better faux Hitchock films out there. The setup is excellent, the mystery comes quick and keeps deepening, and the cast is solid, especially Matthau.
The mystery is clever and the solution is also pretty clever and holds together nicely. So the whole movie *should* be great.
But as ingenious as it is, the creators couldn't find a neat way to explain it all, resulting in a bit too much exposition in the last quarter.
And once the central mystery is solved, there is still a story to deal with, and the movie really struggles with that, in part because it seems afraid to really deal with the political issues it raises, like some movie from the 40s that tries to follow the plight of an unwed mother without mentioning sex. It's not that I didn't understand the whole story by the end, but that the resolution had a strange, muted feeling to it.
Still, overall this is well worth watching.
The mystery is clever and the solution is also pretty clever and holds together nicely. So the whole movie *should* be great.
But as ingenious as it is, the creators couldn't find a neat way to explain it all, resulting in a bit too much exposition in the last quarter.
And once the central mystery is solved, there is still a story to deal with, and the movie really struggles with that, in part because it seems afraid to really deal with the political issues it raises, like some movie from the 40s that tries to follow the plight of an unwed mother without mentioning sex. It's not that I didn't understand the whole story by the end, but that the resolution had a strange, muted feeling to it.
Still, overall this is well worth watching.
- cherold
- Dec 4, 2015