Incendiary

I had never heard of this film, nor did I read anything about it on IMDb beforehand, so I had no expectations whatsoever when I sat down for it. By 20 minutes in, I was enjoying it a lot. Michelle Williams was putting on a London accent which seemed flawless to me. (Okay, I'm a Texan, what do I know about English accents?) The big event seemed to be done pretty well. The film is mainly psychological, about dealing with loss. Miss Williams does very well with this material, and indeed, her performance is the best part of the film. But when I got into the final third of the film, my enjoyment started to flag. The flashback scenes were way overdone, even though I get that it was the director's way of showing the character's break with reality. And in the end, the character's shocking naivete about the mindset of Islamic terrorists was extremely jarring. Overall, I liked the movie, but I am not sure that I could recommend it to anyone else.

A young mother sees her husband and four-year old son off to a soccer match. She then goes home and puts the match on the television. As she watches there are explosions at the stadium. A terrorist attack kills her husband, who she didn't much like anyway, and her son, who she loved dearly, along with a thousand or so others. Oh, and as the young mother watches this unfold on the television screen she is at that moment having sex with another man.

This seems to set up a story about the young mother's guilt and grief. And there's some of that. But there's a bunch of other stuff too, none of which really works. There are conspiracy thriller elements which go practically nowhere. There are romantic entanglements as a couple of men who should really know better try to swoop in on the newly widowed young mother. In a portion of the film which strains credulity to the breaking point we see the young mother reach out to the son of one of the suicide bombers. The film goes off in so many different directions that it ends up being quite a mess. The young mother manages to hold herself together remarkably well given the circumstances. For a while anyway. But eventually she starts to crack and when she does the movie cracks too. At this point it is beyond repair.

If there is anything positive to say it is that, working from a rather lousy script, Michelle Williams still does remarkably well in the role of the young mother. Whatever little successes this movie has belong to Williams. Ewan McGregor is at least passable as one of her suitors. As the other Matthew Macfadyen is a total dud and he also draws the shortest straw, getting the absolute worst of all the film's terrible dialogue. Some of the things this character says are just laughably, impossibly bad. He speaks in a way human beings simply do not speak. The film aims for melodrama but misses the mark. The story doesn't really engage and it moves at a snail's pace. A story more focused on the mother herself and the way she coped with this tragedy might have worked. But this movie gets bogged down as it veers off in other directions. Williams does the best she can but her noble effort can't save this dud.

This is worth watching just for Michelle William's mesmerising performance and I'm not sure why it's been so panned by so many reviewers. The story is interesting, but it's more about emotions of lust, loss, guilt and reconciliation.

An awful waste of 1 hour and 35 minutes. Don't do this to yourself, unless you really enjoy pretentious melodramas with little or no story.

According to the producers, and IMDb, this is a "Drama/Romance/Thriller". Make no mistake - it is not romance, and most certainly not a thriller.

"Like watching paint dry" is an old saying, and probably as meaningless a way of spending time as watching "Incendiary". Still, many of us are likely never to have sat down for an hour and a half to watch paint dry, whereas we have all seen the clichées and the pretentious rubbish which makes up this utterly awful movie. We've seen it all before, though fortunately rarely in such a mindblowingly slooow pace and without virtually any story or message behind it.

I is usually a bad sign when, 20 minutes into a film, still nothing has happened, and the information conveyed would easily fit into less than a minute. In this case, it is indeed fully indicative of what's to come: more of the same.

The story as such can be told in it's entirety in a few sentences and scenes, which in fact it also is - the remainder of the of the movie just consists of endless, clichéd retrospectives, soul searching dialogs, marathon shots of facial expressions, you name it...

Some have criticized the plausibility and credibility of the storyline, very often a problem with today's movies, but that's hardly where this movie falls down - it's in the fact that the story could easily have been told in ten minutes. It would still have been pointless, un-interesting and without meaning or message, but at least it would have been over quickly...

This cod mockney melodrama from the director of Bridget Jones Diary fails at every level. It's clearly a film involving working class characters made by middle class people with both characters and plot lacking any authenticity and credibility whatsoever. In fact, the basic premise of Bridget Jones is transposed to this disastrous attempt at making a serious drama. Instead of writing a diary she writes letters to Osama Bin Laden. Instead of getting caught in a love triangle between Colin Firth and Hugh Grant she gets caught in a love triangle with two equally wet englishmen, uncomfortably played by Ewan MacGregor and Matthew Macfadayen, and all this, after her poor husband and son have been blown to bits in an unconvincing attack on Arsenal football stadium whilst she was shagging the local taloid newspaper reporter! The mawkish sentimentality that ensues is unbearable. In a preposterous celebration of London's blitz spirit, the faces of the victims are printed on the side of WWII air balloons which float above the city in every shot. And Michelle Williams, who miraculously found her sons toy rabbit in the ruins of the football stadium, clutches it to her chest in almost every scene. I find it hard to believe that this ill conceived script ever made it past treatment stage, particularly when so many established UK film companies like CH4 were involved in its development and finance. I find it equally hard to believe that the film was selected to screen at prestigious festivals like Sundance.This film is a worrying indictment of the failings of a the British film industry.