Powder Keg

This short from The Hire-series looks totally different than the other ones. It is more real, like news footage. The Driver, of course again played by Clive Owen, has to save a war photographer (Stellan Skarsgard) who is shot. No funny moments this time, but action and suspense. Very well done.

Powder Keg has been promoted heavily on cable. The trailer for the very short film is excellent. The irony of the format of the very short film is that the trailer runs for about 1/10 the time of the whole film!

More is left out of the film than is in it. We are shown the short tale of a photojournalist who escapes from a horrific massacre; we aren't shown how he does it. We don't know what war this is, it is a stand-in for all of those nameless skirmishes in Latin America.

Clive Owen of the PBS Mystery series Second Sight stars as the 'Driver'. We don't know anything about him as well.

It's really difficult to make an effective short film, but director Alejandro Inarritu does a very good job. Yes, we've seen the plot before (though not so truncated), but the cinematography is grainy, jerky, and alive. You get a sense of the menace and desperation of the people of this unnamed place in fast glances out the window of the, yes, BMW.

Recommended.

Eliminate the country, the brutal government, most real names, and what you have is a look into the inner sole of what it is to be human. Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu does a masterful job with this piece based on a massacre of people and shooting of a war photographer. These BMW Films have all been exceptional. This is true art... when your friends complain about Hollywood, tell them they are not looking hard enough.

While all of the other 4 films in the "Hire" series are fine examples of short film-making, they were pretty much nothing more than Clive Owen's fancy driving of the BMW vehicles with a slight back-story thrown in.

This film was from start to finish a stunning, and powerful story. Gripping, gritty cinematography with fine acting. This time the car was the back-story - not the focal point.

A wonderful conclusion to the series, and a must view. It's free and available on bmwfilms.com right now, so what are you waiting for?

What makes this commercial really stick out from the others is the filming style, which seemed documentary-like. While I found this style a little annoying at first, I ended up actually enjoying it and liking the commercial for being different without being bad(like the one Ang Lee misdirected). The cinematography is very good, and gives us some great intense sequences. The acting is great, both by Clive Owen and Stellan Skarsgård. Owen must have gotten very much used to his character of The Driver by this point, so it's interesting to see him in a more emotional take on the character. Skarsgård is very good as the war photographer, and his final speech, though going very close to crossing over into being cliché, manages to work perfectly and arouse actual emotions in the viewer, rather than just being sappy, manipulative drivel(which this sort of thing almost always is). The action(the little there is) is great and the amount is just right. It's obvious that this was more about story and characters than action and thrills, and director Alejandro González Iñárritu pulls it off perfectly. It's rare to see something so short that manages to hold your interest without a lot of action and whilst managing to tell a story so beautifully and emotionally. While I prefer Ambush over this one, I think it's a great commercial. I recommend this to fans of the commercials and of this type of stories. 8/10