- Contains 1 spoiler, market with: ***** -
Not presenting itself as yet another remake of "The Interview", Five Fingers actually is. Alas, besides maybe the hardship of physical torture, it never adds anything to it's predecessor's accomplishment in terms of suspense, plot or performances. In fact, Five Fingers never gets anywhere near its level.
What I found to be in particular painful to watch wasn't the torture itself, but the way Martijn (Ryan Philippe) acted out his ordeal. To me it looked as if Philippe tried too hard to get his accent right and it made his performance glibly amateur which in turn even dragged down the performance of an otherwise great Colm Meaney. Phillipe's accent btw, being far from anything near Dutch, sounded more like Eastern European.
Besides the acting of Philippi(which to my surprise turned from poor to actually decent towards the end) there is the matter of the flashbacks with the hackneyed Dutch scenery. (If these scenes were set in Switzerland they would have had the cast eat cheese on mountaintops with endless pastures with grazing cows wearing expensive timepieces). Scenery aside, The way these flashbacks pushed the plot didn't work for me at all. It made it being served like French fries at a drive-in and caused the build-up of suspense to flatline.
Admittedly the movie did become more enjoyable as Phillipe's acting improved but I couldn't help being annoyed every now and then with scenes that were just too implausible. E.g.:
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At some point (after days) Philippe is almost tenderly washed by the female terrorist. This only to be followed by the brute severing of yet another finger. Why give the guy a wash if he's in for a torture? And the severing of that last finger seemed to only serve the title of this flick anyway, I mean, he was practically begging to have it knifed off. Didn't make sense
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What ultimately kept me watching was the performance of Fishburn who once again proved to be a brilliant actor but who also had the best part of the script to work with.
All in all one is just far better off seeing "The Interview" with that other Matrix-icon: Hugo Weaving. And when you do, I'm confident you won't find this review that disagreeable.
3.5/10
"The Interview", 1998 www.imdb.com/title/tt0120714/