thechrish

Basically, this is about a glorified psychopath that has escaped. They keep talking about how smart he is, how his light eyes signify "power," and blah blah blah, but they fail to produce any evidence of his genius and power. He's basically just a guy who started killing small animals and graduated to killing people - your basic serial killer. To be honest, I was surfing the web the entire time I was watching this, which actually made it slightly more enjoyable. I think if I wasn't surfing the web, it would have been brutally slow, predictable, and painful to watch. You can pretty much see all of the twists and turns (if you can call them that) coming, and even the dialog is predictable.

Supposedly, the killer is into some kind of Greek numerology, which if done correctly, it's supposed to give him that much more power. They go into it briefly, but it's something that a high school student's imagination can come up with and then they don't really go too far in depth on it. So, it's a half hearted effort to mystify the killer and provide some insight into why he does what he does. Overall, since it was slightly entertaining while surfing the web I'd put this between a 3 and a 4, but I decided to be generous and give it a 4.

This film actually had some interesting parts, and the plot isn't bad. I think it was the ending that bothered me more than anything. I don't want to post an unwanted spoiler, so I will keep it at that. The film sets the tone nicely in the beginning, and it keeps you interested for most of the film. The characters are fairly interesting, and it really does keep you guessing until the very end. So, I do like the mystery side of it, but I am just a mystery movie fan in general, so I'm not very hard to please in that area. I'd say as a mystery alone, this is actually a little above average as you have at least a half dozen suspects, and the director keeps alternating between them. BUT, the ending to me was pretty lame. I'm not a big moral type guy when it comes to movies, but the implied point in the ending was disturbing to me from that standpoint. I just feel like they took a film that could have been great and spilled grape juice on it - and once that dries, it can't be cleaned up.

I thought this was entertaining, but I don't see what all the hoopla is about. The story moves rather slowly, and takes quite some time to pick up steam. Now, obviously this is not an action film for the most part, but the problem is there seems to be a lot of dead time and space with not a whole lot going on. Once it finally gets going, it gets a bit more interesting.

The acting is overall pretty good from the girl to Matt Damon. Jeff Bridges isn't bad, but I'm just not a big fan of his in general. I mean, Bridges is the Big Lebowski after all, but it seems like a little of the Lebowski comes out in all of his characters (this one included) even where the big lebowski is not called for. Matt Damon does a pretty solid job overall to the point that you forget you are even watching him.

I thought the ending was terrible and random, which is typical of the Coen brothers even though this is a remake. For me, this was watchable, but not great.