Angli: The Movie

When I say say that Hell froze over when this movie hit the theater I really mean it. This movie should never have been filmed... but then again, here it is. A shining milestone in Maltese filmography. Not! I could go on at great lengths on how terrible this film actually is but I decided to turn a blind eye on all the lighting and sound defects, the poor special effects and so on. Let the producers take cover behind the old lie that we don't have the equipment... What I am going to comment about is the story, or lack thereof.

What hit me the hardest was that the whole script was completely unoriginal and uninspired. The storyline was nothing more than a regurgitation of ideas borrowed from other films and badly executed to say the least. So okay, the movie was low budget, so why didn't they create a script that used the plot and the acting to push the story along instead of relying so much on the "special-effects" that were mediocre in comparison with what the rest of the world has? Fact is, Malta has good script writers and Malta has good actors but none were used in this film and it is a shame that it is by such a film that we are setting our standards.

Completely hopeless. All the way down to the acting. And the Jackie Chan wannabe didn't impress anyone either.

The film's plot was overly exaggerated. It opens with a man who tragically lost his daughter in an operation. Yet the man doesn't swear once. Not very realistic, especially given Malta's standards. And the girl being hung from a 20 storey building is as calm as ever...just hanging there seemingly enjoying the view.

The music of the film was horrendous. Composing music is somewhat an honour these days... yet in this "serious" film you have the name "DJ TOBY" splashed across screen. So much for keeping a straight face. THe whole "gritty" cop action film ends up having a disastrous soundtrack which seems to sound like a cacophony of washing machines working in harmonious disorder.

And don't get me started on the ending - I mean really, the weaponry a police investigator can operate is amazing... he actually knows how to use a rocket launcher. Simply scintillating.

Same goes for the date scene, which somehow zooms out through the other guy's TV. I mean COME ON. There's a limit to how much gibberish we can take.

To Sigcomm: I see you find Angli enthralling.. and you seem to ponder how much better Maltese films will get with bigger budgets.. well let me tell you.. they won't improve.

Angli was seriously hopeless not because it had a low budget, but because the director didn't work around the budget not to mention that the script itself was badly written and bluntly exaggerated.

Extremely cheap and laughable. This 'movie' was probably done at one go and the film makers did not even take the time to review what they had done. Or they didn't care less. Practically everything about this movie sucked big time, excuse me for the language. During and after the movie I felt angry and amused at the same time. So, let us mention some of the horrible disasters in the movie. Acting. Purely, 100% laughing stock. Where's emotion? Do you calmly state that your sister has been shot while she is dieing right in front of you? After the person in question died, we see the husband a tad sad in a couple of the following scenes. He puts some flowers on her grave in a neutral mood and basically forgets the whole deal. Wow. The blonde girl - not the one that betrays them - (I don't know the names) was easily among the most horrible actors I have ever seen. She looked like she was constantly reading from a book. Enough on acting. Filming. The first shot was filmed from a helicopter. The camera was bobbing up and down. I thought "hmm, maybe that's on purpose?" Then it also moved in other scenes so I confirmed my suspicions. And colour. The colour was very unsaturated. It was similar to news filming, haha. There were also a couple of points were the saturation or some colour scale changed suddenly. The camera angles were totally uninspired and oftentimes awkward. There were a couple of shots which I actually liked but otherwise, forget about it. Audio. As others mentioned there are too many dropouts. The audio is also not synchronized in not only one, but marvelously MANY scenes. I was plain disgusted by this. A cheap budget has nothing to do with these mistakes. Its plain carelessness. The music also lacked something most of the time. 'Effects'. Haha. Just plain funny. The scanner would have looked infinitely better without a cheap effect like it had. The explosions were stupid. 256 color and out of perspective, not to mention size. OK I'll give them the fact that they did not have such a good budget after all. But in that case don't try to make a movie at all, or do not use such crap effects in the first place. The big "Angli" splash at the beginning was terrible. Slowmo was also overused and/or used unaesthetically. Plot. Someone said he liked the plot. In general, the plot was too simple and undeveloped. I cannot say it was crap, since I've seen Hollywood movies with crappier story lines, but there were some hilarious parts too. The part where the main actors were attacked from a freighter was just stupid. The car could have done one of two extremely simple things: 1) sped by and left the freighter behind. 2) braked immediately with the result that the freighter kept moving forward and lost them after a quick turn of the car. Also, a fact that Maltese people should have noticed, the chase started in the bypass and ended miles away. No suspense of disbelief at all. Two other things. One, the fact that they got out of the overturned car and didn't even look around for their assailants, who also vanished from the scene without checking whether they were dead as they hoped. Two, the car overturned in broad daylight. The towing truck came in the night. Blame it on Maltese inefficiency, though I've heard that those towing agencies are actually pretty quick. The producers could have done much better with whatever small budget they had. A three-month school project would have been shorter but better. This should have been called Angli: Disaster Movie.

About the fact that someone gave this movie a 10, I can't imagine who would have done so. As you might have understood had you read my review, budgets wouldn't have made bad actors start acting good. Nor would it have synchronized the audio. 12 Angry Men of 1954 is an amazing movie shot mostly in one room. The budget for Angli could have made a movie just as good. The same goes for The Conversation. Excellent production, har de har har!

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.

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'.