Reviews

This movie is a great proof that Joe McMoviegoer only cares about the plot in its most simplified synopsis version, and nothing else.

I admit: the IMDb synopsis DID sound interesting. But an interesting idea is one thing; how it's executed is a whole new ball game.

Let me start by saying that the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire show is not (repeat: NOT) aired live: it's a recording. This makes the entire ending fall flat on its face, as it rests on the premise that it IS aired live. How can people just ignore such plot holes in order to enjoy the movie, I don't know.

Speaking of the show - one of the early questions was this:

What is written on the national emblem of India:

A. The TRUTH Triumphs. B. LIES Triumph. C. FASHION Triumphs. D. MONEY Triumphs.

Most of us have never seen the emblem of India, but can easily guess the answer, right? Yet our dumb protagonist uses the Ask the Audience "lifeline".

Come on, Mr. Director. I know you had to get rid of one lifeline in order to leave only two for your vision of the grand finale, but couldn't you have picked a more realistic question to do so? Is our protagonist such a moron that he actually thought the national emblem might say "Lies/Fashion/Money Triumphs"?!

The premise of the movie is that Jamal, the protagonist, albeit an uneducated slumdog, knows the answers to most of the questions simply because he has "lived them", so to speak. An interesting fictional premise, but...

Thus our Jamal knows that the revolver was invented by Colt (and not Browning, Wesson, et al) simply because his brother once, when attacked by bad guys, miraculously, deus ex machina-style, pulled a Colt we'd never seen him acquire prior to that and killed one of them.

And that's how Jamal knew Colt and not Wesson invented the revolver.

In a similarly inane fashion, he knows that the face on the $100 bill is Ben Franklin, because his blind(!) slumteen beggar buddy, after Jamal had given him $100 and described the face on the bill as a "bald man with hair on the sides", told him it's Ben Franklin. Are we supposed to believe that underage, illiterate, uneducated Indian beggar kids that have never seen a book or a TV set in their life, let alone a 100-dollar bill, know what Franklin looks like? Please. But I guess anything's possible in a movie in which an elementary school slum dropout talks to British tourists in perfect BBC RP, firing out collocations such as "in a top-class fashion" and "maximum-pileup traffic accident" like it ain't no thang.

Also, the final, million-dollar question is (drum roll): Name the third Musketeer: Athos, Porthos...

Come on. If the final questions were that easy, we'd all be millionaires.

And how does Jamal know the answer? He takes a blind guess, because it was his destiny to win. "It was written". And he guesses right.

Just like he told the (also teenage) love of his life that they'll find each other no matter what, because "it is written". Come on. I haven't heard such salad-tossers blurted by teenagers(!) since Dawson's Creek. Even The Last of the Mohicans barely managed to get off with similar cheese.

I could go on forever.

So, in the end, our fate's pet Jamal answers all of the questions, while his big brother frees the girl from the jaws of mafia by killing the boss. Mind you, he first killed bad guys, then joined them, and now he switched it up again while you weren't looking and mended his ways. He held Jamal at gunpoint, raped the love of his life, and cut her face, but now he suddenly wants to help them. Must have been touched by the hand of God off-screen. Anyways, the girl is now free to catch the impossible live airing of the show, reunites with Jamal on-air, and they live happily ever after as millionaires. And she thought they would "only be united in death" (direct quote... the kids of today, so profound).

Because puppy love conquers all. Especially if your future-boyfriend is about to become a millionaire.

So, two hours of an interesting premise ruined by carelessness in details and chuckle-inducing implausibility, slopped with saccharine, drowned in a one-sided portrayal of life in India (read the other negative reviews for more on that), and spiced up with a dash of that straight-out-of-Bollywood fairytale love story - which you couldn't give a rat's ass about even if you wanted to, since the girl suffers from a severe case of character underdevelopment (all we know about her is that she's "the most beautiful girl in the world" (of course)), and there's more chemistry in your hamburger than there is between her and Jamal.

But I guess the morning after watching the movie you'll only remember the core of the story as summarized in the IMDb synopsis, and that would suffice. Good for you.

P.S. Nice hand-held camera work in a couple of shots. And nice colors. The only things hinting, albeit infinitely remotely, at the fact that this is the same guy that directed Trainspotting. Incomprehensible.

That so many people fawn over this movie is a phenomenon.

Let me keep this short.

This movie's "surprise ending" consists in revealing that most of the characters (minus the protagonist) were, in fact, dead = 3/4 of the plot didn't even take place in reality, it's a figment of the protagonist's imagination. Which, unlike the ending of "The Others", makes you feel cheaply tricked, as that means 3/4 of the scares that were supposed to make you crap your pants never took place.

The rest is one mess of a plot (notice the fine difference between "messy" and "mind-f*ckingly complex"), that still manages to be boring, with nothing but jump scares, slow zooming of doors with "tension-building" muzak, and sudden blasts of various FX - sickeningly hackneyed techniques that by now, in this day and age, should scare NOBODY. The hard-of-hearing must be falling asleep during this puppy.

Most of the "scary" scenes seem totally random and for-their-own-sake. Scary if one's still easily scared, yes, but upon further inspection utterly irrelevant and pointless. For instance, why... WHY do we need to see yet ANOTHER pale-Asian-woman-with-black-hair-over-her-face, moving-in-a-twitchy-manner type of deal? WHY? Is anyone still scared of that? And why is there blood coming out of her womb? What's that supposed to symbolize? An abortion? What abortion? Oh, wait, I get it - it looks "scary", so who gives a crap about what does it all mean, right?

If the younger sister wasn't even there (she's long dead, the older sister is imagining her), then the solo scary scenes involving only her are nothing more than a cheap gimmick, as they couldn't have taken place - there's no older sister around to imagine her. Makes for a great aftertaste.

Etc. etc.

Wake up, dear viewers. You've been tricked by cheap chicanery.

P.S. The camera-work and the colors were quite stylish.

In order to truly get a feel for this series, one needs to see all seven of the episodes (each of which tops 60 min), preferably in as few sittings as possible. That's nearly eight hours of plot that boils down to this:

1. Bored soldiers shooting the breeze. 2. Endless briefings littered with military lingo followed by endless radio communication littered with military lingo. 3. Five minutes of (usually random and mission-unrelated) action. 4. Bored soldiers shooting the breeze.

I know the point of Generation Kill is to realistically depict what war really looks like when you're a 21st century Marine in a technologically vastly superior army, but does one really need 8 h of it to get the point? Each episode looks EXACTLY the same, and it gets old by the time you sit down to watch the 4th one.

We follow a group of Marines on their way to Baghdad, expecting a grand finale in the 7th episode. But it never occurs. The war is already over by the time they reach it, so they just get there, detonate one leftover bomb, and go home. Nice to see where gazillions of dollars and years of training went to. But kudos for showing the reality as is.

At the same time, realism is also what this series has got going for it (it's just that no one needs 8 h of the same old, same old). We see Marines going on the ever-changing and often pointless/contradictory/inconsequential missions in their Humvees, which any regular could have performed just as well, and which are usually more suited for tanks and LAVs. As one Marine remarks: "We are finely-tuned Ferraris in a demolition derby". Yet there's very little concrete combat shown in each episode. And that's my major gripe with it. Maybe HBO didn't want to spend millions of dollars on pyrotechnics, or maybe it didn't feel necessary to turn their series into a "Saving Pvt. Ryan"-style action. But it would have been nice to see more of what all those mission briefings and radio talk amounted to in each episode. As it stands, it feels anticlimactic. But I guess that was the idea: realism. Missions don't look like the D-Day or the "Call of Duty". They're routine and boring.

Also, there's almost no plot: the whole series feels more like a mess of little snapshots and events, or notes written in a diary, often jumping from one scene to another pretty haphazardly. But - I guess that was the idea.

There's also an overabundance of characters. It takes you a few episodes to link the names with the faces and remember just who's who exactly, since they all pretty much look the same and few stand out. But I guess that's army.

The in-between-mission juvenile antics and banal talk are often interspersed with faux-philosophizing about the war in general, with lines such as:

"If you kill people in peacetime, you end up in jail. But here you get a medal for it".

No sh#t, Captain Obvious.

And that's where the viewer boredom really starts to set in. Once again, there's nothing wrong with it per se, but when you stretch it out across all seven episodes and lace it with minimum action, it gets old. This would've made for a powerful two-part series, but then I guess it wouldn't have imparted what it's supposed to, and that's the fact that for these guys war was pretty boring. Not a novelty in and of itself, but realism can never get overrated.

On the other hand, I find the understated (and often absurd) humor to be a nice touch. For instance, although they're fighting in a desert, the Marines are issued forest camouflage. They can't get the command to send them batteries for their night vision goggles, so they trade pictures of their girlfriends with another platoon to get them. Etc, etc.

There's also an over-the-top, Sgt.-Hartman-from-the-"Full Metal Jacket"-like sergeant(?), who provides additional comic relief with his obsession about the grooming standard, unleashing streams of red-faced, heavy-accented fury upon soldiers if their mustache are longer than their lip edges or their shirts aren't tucked in.

Also, unlike in any other war movie, soldiers are shown as humans and not robots, who (surprise, surprise) need to empty their bladder or take a dump once in a while. Or jack off. The amount of times someone is shown taking a dump is almost ridiculous, but I like the realism and the underlying humor of it.

To wind up this run-on comment, I'd like to cite the Captain, who said: "I'm not afraid of the Iraqis - I'm more afraid of doing something that would displease the General."

And that sums up rather nicely what being in the army is all about.

So, a realistically-produced series that is often more than the sum of its parts. But that's not a bad place to be. With a Hollywood budget, this would've been epic. But then it would've been spoiled by cartoonish heroes and patriotic self-aggrandizement. So, come to think of it, it's just fine as is.

I agree with all of the panegyrics, so I'll only point out the one thing that everyone seems to be missing (and it's not hard to do, given how mesmerizing the movie is) and which "ruined it" for me.

One of the pivotal morals of the story, its leitmotif, is the now famous line "The saddest thing in life is a wasted talent". It appears at the beginning, throughout, and again at the end. It's practically the closing line.

Yet we never see the MANIFESTATION of said talent in Calogero. What's he talented in? School? Baseball? Italian cuisine? We never get even the slightest indication of what that line might refer to when it comes to our protagonist.

In my opinion, if such an important (if not THE most important) aspect of the movie had been "anchored" in something concrete (if we'd seen Calogero excel in baseball, school, whatever), the movie might have packed a stronger punch. Calogero leaves his mafia ways, having finally realized what his father has been talking about all along - that there's nothing sadder than a wasted talent.

But we never see what Calogero's talent is!

That's why the oft-repeated wasted-talent moral seems to be left hanging in mid-air without any concrete point of reference. It might as well have been replaced with "Take your vitamins daily". It's no more than an abstract wise saying. And that's why this movie hits the home run, but there's no bases on the field.

Or something.

The only shocking thing about this slasher is its rating - 7.0?! Obviously, some people are REALLY easy to please/shock.

First off: if the events take place on Christmas (totally irrelevant for the plot, by the way), why is all the foliage GREEN (as in late-summer green)?! And this is not Australia, mind you, this is France. Call me pedantic, but such "oversights" are inexcusable and foreshadow all the bad that is to come.

Secondly: the occasional in utero CGI shots of the baby (besides being completely unnecessary) are so laughably cheap that I can't fathom how come MORE people didn't find them tragically detrimental, especially since more often than not they appear when the "tension" is at its highest and totally destroy it.

Thirdly: comparing this flick to "High Tension" (another French slasher over-hyped by patriots and the easily shocked) might mislead those who've seen it into believing "Inside" has some "psychological" undertones (i.e. that the killer is a projection of the protagonist's alter ego, like in "High Tension"). But it does not. This is as physical as it gets.

A basic rundown of the plot (SPOILERS AHEAD!!!): A pregnant couple has a car crash in which the guy dies. Sometime after, the grief-stricken pregnant widow Sarah gets attacked at her home by a "mysterious" woman, who apparently wants to harm her and/or the baby. Is she real or is she a figment of a conscience burdened by the "survivor's guilt"? Is Sarah symbolically fighting some inner demons? Is she another Rosemary from "Rosemary's Baby"? Nope. Turns out, the attacker is very much real: she was also in that car crash and lost her own baby. And now wants to take Sarah's as her own, killing everyone in her path.

Boo! It's like all interesting movie premises have already been beaten to death and sucked dry, so what you get is one-dimensional, improbable nonsense like this.

What unfolds in between is some of the most unlikely string of events you're ever going to encounter on celluloid, all heftily slopped with buckets of gore. Logical behavior goes out the window, as "plot development" only serves to string two ridiculous gory scenes together, and with it any chance of this movie rising above the slasher level. Now, that may be fine if that's your cup of tea. But "Inside" wants to be so much more.

The problem as I see it is two-fold. Firstly, most people have grown numb to blood and violence. I've spend my childhood in a war zone in Yugoslavia and can blissfully slurp a tomato soup while watching even the most goriest scenes around. Others have grown numb through news, internet and an overabundance of movie violence. Now, that may be unfortunate psychologically speaking, but for aspiring horror directors it means they must try harder to scare and scar us than by drowning their flicks in self-serving, senseless gore.

Secondly, even those faint of heart will grown numb if you beat them over the head with non-stop pointless violence. It gets to a point where it starts being comical. Like in the last "Rambo".

Back to the plot. If your viewer is perplexed by the illogical behavior of your characters and is constantly going "Why?", how do you expect him to be shocked? For instance, Sarah never attempts to escape through the bathroom window (or any other windows, for that matter). The woman (a regular citizen up until then) manages to outmaneuver and kill three (THREE!) armed police officers, because police is, naturally, incompetent. When Sarah comes in the room looking for a weapon to defend herself, instead of any of THEIR weapons (including a grenade launcher), she goes for a POKER! Logic? Anyone? And then, later on, possibly exhausted by all the gore, she goes to bed mid-action and falls asleep like a baby, only (of course) to be attacked by the ever-awake killer woman. She even manages to inadvertently kill her own visiting mother, mistaking her for the killer: an implausible event which serves no other purpose then to give us a nice shot of a squirting jugular and up the ante on the "sickness" with some unnecessary matricide.

To a similar end, you also get a scene in which one of the officers (previously shot pointblank in the head) magically resurrects and proceeds to beat SARAH (not the killer woman, mind you) with a truncheon across her pregnant belly (why? WHY?!), causing Sarah to spurt buckets of blood from her vagina. Sick? Would have been, if the scene made ANY sense at all. And if it wasn't interspersed with yet another laughable shot of the pathetically computer-rendered baby inside her.

And the score? Sudden, loud, cacophonous sounds during "scary" scenes. Yaaawwwn.

I could go on and on about all that is wrong about this movie, but anyone still reading this has already wasted enough time on it, so do yourself a favor and don't go watch it too (a benevolent advice that far too often goes ignored around here - myself being guilty as charged too).

A shallow, illogical mess of a movie for the faintest of heart and undemanding. Pulls nothing but cheap gory punches. Go revisit "Rosemary's Baby" for the 100th time if necessary.

you probably know the story by now: two girls (marie and alex) go to marie's parent's country house to study. a "deranged" french redneck killer appears and starts killing them for no reason, with alex escaping and fighting him. in the end, it turns out ("fight club"-style) that alex is in fact the killer, and that there was no redneck to begin with. whoopieee!!!

if alex is the killer, then 90% of the movie involving alex fighting/running from the redneck didn't happen. makes for a truly satisfying aftertaste.

and how come alex goes out of the blue so completely freakin' insane that she kills 4 people in gruesome ways, yet has been friends with the unsuspecting marie at college for a long time (and, apparently, displayed no symptoms whatsoever)? turns out she's a dyke with a secret crush on marie, which drove her insane. ...and made her cut her mother's fists and kill her little brother with a rifle. ...or something.

anyways, the alter-ego-"fight club" (and X other movies)-like twist in the end serves only to justify the completely unlikely plot and over-the-top bloodshed before and, inadvertently (unlike in "fight club"), makes 90% of what we've seen totally illogical and impossible to have happened. "fight club" works because the protagonist and his alter ego always occupy the same physical space. this does not. here we eg. see alex trying to untie marie, as they both watch the "killer" outside kill marie's younger brother in the cornfield. etc, etc. dear director, the person and its persona cannot occupy two different spaces, performing two different actions at the same time. this only shows that the twist is a poor gimmick that's easy to fall for at first, but when you rewind the movie in your head in light of it, you find it just doesn't work and the whole movie just doesn't make sense.

and if alex killed her killer alter ego in the end (i.e. "cured" herself of "evil"), why does he appear again? cheap.

plus, you've got muse's "newborn" as a score (appears twice). imagine combining the plot above with muse.

self-aware, stylish and cheaply manipulative. for those easily shocked and reluctant to give a second thought about anything.

I haven't seen but 10 min of the movie, but i've seen enough. It had potential, you say? Well, let me break it down for you.

Os, formerly one of the "Shadowmen" (who were "exiled to the Earth for committing crimes against cosmic evolution") is accosted by the "White Warrior" and converted by the "Light". Now a soldier of good, he must fight the bad guys ("Shadowmen"), with the aid of the "Elements", who have come into the possession of some "Tablet" and threaten to destroy the Earth.

If you're older than 6 and that sounds like potential... Well, I hate to be the one to break it to you, but you're in a serious need of a life.

The plot's simply inane. I'm all for a little bit of the good ole Good vs. Evil type of action, but not when it seems to have been written by a slightly retarded kid who's never been out of the house and is fed a steady diet of New Age, Matrix and X-Box. And whose only layer is Absolutely Superficial. I mean, layered "adult fairy tales" are one thing - obvious, jejune, insultingly simple stories for the slow on the uptake are another. Add to that idiotic electronic "score" (compliments of Casio defaults), cheap "effects", laughable studio scenery and lighting, wanna-be Matrix/kung-fu fights, amateurish camera-work, and a lot of "profound", solemnly-delivered lines containing a lot of capitalized nouns ("the War is within", "Freedom is inside all life"...) and you get a mess that's so bad it ain't even funny. No, seriously. This is a whole new level.

where do you begin? first off, there are so many characters that after a while you just stop giving a damn. they just keep popping up. when they first appear on screen, we get a freeze-frame with their name, crime, etc. in the best of guy ritchie fashion. such "meta-cinematic" devices are totally out of place here, and detract from the movie's overall tone and seriousness.

which brings me to the second point: with so many characters, there's an overabundance of dialog. i mean, the movie's supposed to be a boxing/prison movie, yet it's got more lines than "pride and prejudice"! i guess they needed to "spice up" the clichéd and simple, yet always effective underdog-becomes-champ plot. and spice it up they do - with more paper-cut characters and trite, go-nowhere dialog.

however, the movie's biggest problem is that it spends infinitely more time depicting the bad guy, than it does our hero wesley. he's got at least 5 times as much screen-time. AT LEAST. the bad guy's obviously directly inspired by tyson, and the movie's further "spiced up" by flashback interviews with the victim and himself. please. just let them beat the sh*t out of each other.

i haven't watched the movie until the end, i got too bored. even the fights, while excellently choreographed, seem to require annoying commentary by an inmate in order to be more interesting. if your depiction of boxing ain't interesting enough in and off itself, then you've got a problem, buddy.

like i said, i haven't seen the end, but i guess it's not that hard to predict. the good guy wins. which would be okay, if we got a chance to know him.

i haven't read the book, so i'm taking the movie as is (which is the way it should be done). and STILL it's ruined by what i can only attribute to carelessness and paying too much attention to the "trees" instead of the "woods" (or vice versa, who knows?). by now anyone who reads this is already familiar with the story, so i'll just point out a few things that killed it for me.

in the opening scene, will is hunting CG-rendered deer through the derelict city in a SPOTLESSLY clean and shiny red mustang. 1) are you telling me you actually washed and waxed it so that you'd look good for a bunch of zombies? 2) why hunt? it's only been 3 years after the virus breakout, and there's still electricity. SURELY there must be some frozen/canned meat around. - just break into any supermarket, dude! the whole scene is totally absurd and pointless, but hey - i guess it looks "good". and that was obviously the only point.

speaking of cars: the girl's SUV is also spotless. i guess that in between running from zombies and staying alive, people take time to keep their cars squeaky clean. you never know who might be watching.

the girl tells will that there's a survivors' shelter somewhere in virginia. and how does she know about it? 'cause "god told her".

please.

said shelter is surrounded by what looks like a 16-ft wall at most. and two guards with M-16s. previously we saw zombies effortlessly climbing 3 stories high into will's apartment and hanging from ceilings. this wall would be a child's play for them. but whatever.

and the "zombies" themselves? souped-up gollums. CGI stuff here, folks, and not all that realistic either. if they hadn't destroyed that mustang, they might have had the money to hire a couple of stunts. 'cause it's hard to be afraid of bad CGI. and the fact that most "scares" are jump scares accompanied by loud blasts of FX doesn't help either.

also, i find the whole "cast away" angle, with will talking to dolls in the best tom hanks fashion completely unnecessary. he's got a clever dog for a companion, does he REALLY need to hit on girl dolls? those scenes might have provided some uncalled-for "comic" relief had he been doing it for fun. but he's FOR REAL. you might lose your mind on a deserted island due to lack of content, but after only three years in new york (no pun intended)?! come on! his days are full, there's so much to do, and he's a rational and intelligent man who's keeping himself fit, focused and organized, and is still trying to find the cure and other survivors. why flip it all around and try to sell us that he's in fact lost his mind?

will uses one of the dolls ("frank"?) as a decoy for zombies, so that he could catch them and test the cure. but then at one point he flips, starts shouting at frank for standing in the street and exposing himself, steps on his own trap and gets attacked by zombies. but not before he cuts the rope he's hanging from by his leg WHILE he's hanging from it (instead of pulling himself up), thus falling from 12 ft onto concrete and landing on his knife. brilliant. what a great way to advance your plot - by making your fit army general and scientist a mindless idiot.

80% of the movie is will alone with his dog. yet his death scene is so short and understated that i thought it was just a gimmick and that he'd emerge alive and well later on. but no, that's it. the whole ending's over in the blink of an eye.

plus, there could've been more shots depicting how will spends his days. i mean, come on: he's got the whole city, the whole WORLD to himself! let your imagination run wild, for f*ck's sake! is playing golf on a plane carrier all you could come up with, mr. screenwriter?

and why don't we get ANY explanation, or even a clue, as to how come the cure is in will's blood? is it because he's listening to a lot of bob marley, who said that "music is the ultimate cure"?

i've got SO many gripes, but this is already too long, so i'll sum it up. a cool idea and great visuals (at least some of the time), ruined by being needlessly cluttered with nonsensical BS and bad CGI. stick to the meat and bones, don't spice it up and overkill it. you're ruining a great meal that's hiding somewhere underneath.

i work as a translator for a local TV station. since it's local, it's criminally underfunded. but it has a program to run. translated, that means it's buying a lot of cheap B-movies. so in my "line of duty", i'm forced to watch a lot of crap. and i mean A LOT. more than anyone who has a choice ever had to. "crash point zero" was one such example. and oh my god, where do you begin? the other reviewers broke it down pretty accurately: from borrowing unused and differently textured shots from other movies (ed wood would've been proud!), to characters driving three (THREE!) distinct cars (one of them blue, two of them red) within a single scene, to the laughable and meaningless dialog, HORRENDOUS acting, and an all-around stench of amateur pointlessness. the list of examples of sheer stupidity in this flick would be higher than burj dubai! i guess 99% of what little budget they had went into the last-scene explosion (the only semi-decent thing in this abomination of a movie) to the detriment of everything else. really, some of this stuff is simply beyond words and has to be seen to be believed. what's astonishing is a feeling that the crew (well, at least most of them - some "actors" have that "what the f*ck am i doing here? hope nobody i know sees this" look on their face) labor under the illusion that they're creating a serious and suspenseful thriller, and obviously take it all very seriously, which is just amazing. i mean, there's nothing wrong in a B-flick that's aware of its "B-ness" and shamelessly flaunts it, but a deluded B-flick that thinks it's something more than it is is just pathetic. granted there are even worse, cheaper and misguidedly serious movies than this ("hyper sonic", for example), this still pretty much redefines the term "a B-movie". if you're done watching your paint dry, rent this and be amazed. really, it's quite a feat.

seems to me this movie is getting excessive praise only because it's a euro flick, and therefore by default inherently better than the Hollywood remake (which i haven't seen, so i'll take everybody's word for it). well, let me try to objectively break it down for you. a guy's girlfriend disappears (and since they were a playfully loving couple, it's immediately obvious it's in fact a case of involuntary disappearance) and the guy spends the next 3 years looking for her. at his wit's end, he scrapes his last francs and goes public (stating he only wants to know what happened and not punish the kidnapper, mind you). the kidnapper sees it, admires the guy's perseverance, and decides to contact him.

so far so good, right? only now you're already way past 1 h into the movie. and here's where things start to go terribly downhill. after 3 soul-wrecking years of search and uncertainty, the guy simply gets in the car with the kidnapper and calmly listens to his drawn-out recount of the events, again pointing out he only wants to know what happened? puh-leeease. what do you think happened? she's been missing for THREE YEARS, buddy, it's obvious he killed her or did something terrible to her. the two talk like they're the best of buddies, with some of the most insanely unlikely, almost comical dialog ever. i find it HIGHLY implausible that ANYONE would simply sit there and listen to the guy's story about how he put the love of your life to sleep and kidnapped her, after several failed attempts to do so with other women (flashback scenes which also unintentionally border on comedy, ruining what little "suspense" the movie managed to produce), after which she disappears forever. how can you just want to know what happened, and not punish the guy who did it? maybe the dutch are total weaklings with skewed logic, i don't know. i would've tortured the guy until he confessed. or at least trust the hand of the law and forensics.

anyways, (SPOILER ALERT!) the kidnapper offers the guy to go through the same experience by offering him to drink a sleeping pills-laced coffee. yeah, sure - drink it up, buddy, that's surely the ONLY way to know. the dude does so and ends up in a coffin, buried alive. he wakes from his drug-induced sleep and although we can see that there's some light seeping through the cracks (so it's obvious the coffin's still not totally covered in dirt), the dude wastes what little oxygen he has by running his lighter and feebly tapping on the lid. dude, kick it like your life depends on it! and that's it. the killer's motive? his wifey and daughters thought too highly of him, so he wanted to see if he was capable of doing evil things, thus burying two people alive. come on. during one of the scenes he pointed out that "there are worst things than death", leading you to mistakenly believe our hero's loved one met some terribly untoward fate. yet it turns out it's nothing but the plain old murder. also, much time has been devoted to depicting the killer as some sort of a numbers-obsessed math-whiz (hinting at a "beautiful mind"-ish angle), and a pedantic perfectionist. yet he comically botches the first few kidnap attempts. once he even accidentally uses his "weapon", the chloroform-soaked napkin, to wipe his nose, thus putting himself to sleep in what has to be one of the most out-of-place and pointlessly "humorous" scenes in what's otherwise tauted as the "most disturbing movie ever". people, PLEASE. in the end, this whole math angle comes to one big NOTHING and could've easily been left out completely - the killer could've been a delivery guy, with absolutely NO detriments to the story WHATSOEVER.

to wrap it up, this is a drawn-out and unlikely flick that just reeks of excessive European noodling and self-importance. kind of like "irreversible": 10 amazing minutes amidst heaps of vacuous philosophizing and dialog. it makes me want to see the US remake - at least it's characters might act with more common sense and logic and the director won't be laboring under the illusion he's creating a timeless peace of life-changing art.

this movie seems like an exercise in buildup with little or no substance. you're constantly scared, but nothing's really happening. that may be a praise-worthy achievement on the director's/FX part, but makes for a frustrating aftertaste. the gory ending was a complete anticlimax. turns out the dude just went crazy and killed his co-workers for no reason. they weren't even annoying him. and why did he kill his wife? did he have a mental illness history or simply went crazy out of thin air for nothing? a reference to "alleged satanic ritual abuses" and a shot with an inverted pentagram graffiti in the background makes you take a misleading hint that the denouement might be something more, but it isn't. it's easy to over-praise this movie in an era of mindless buckets-of-blood/jump-scare teen slashers, but while it does contain more substance, it still basically relies solely on style. and while the style IS scary and subtle and blah-blah, a second viewing will reveal a substantial void underneath. i've got so many gripes with it. the titular character, the dead 9-session patient marry - are we to believe she developed a multiple personality disorder (one of the persons is a killer, simon) and went on a killing spree simply from falling on a doll and getting wounded? oh, sorry, i forgot: "simon (the killer in us all/devil?) lives in the weak and the wounded". see? wounded. and why did mike go crazy? the scene's creepy, but makes no sense. the spookiest part are the recordings of the nine sessions with marry. yet it all starts crumbling at the end to reveal nothing underneath. or at least something infinitely more mundane that it had us believe during the buildup. could've been SO good.

sorry, Brits - i know you want to praise your own movie, but let's be objective here: "descent" is nothing more that the n-th variation of the same old, same old. only instead of the old house/abandoned base/etc. you get badly-lit caves (ooh!). and instead of aliens/ghosts/etc. you get some "batmen" of sorts. and a bunch of hot cliff-hanging chicks. the rest is all jump-scares (you know the drill: sudden cues accompanied by loud FX), which is the cheapest and most annoying way of "shocking". plus, the dialog is filled with that stating-the-obvious bullsh*t like "we need to get out of here!", "we need to get to the other side!", etc. no sh*t, sherlock! that immediately gets me annoyed and insulted every time. the same goes for that whole "girl hears strange noises in a pitch-black tunnel and goes ALONE to see what it is (and, of course, gets attacked in a jump-scare)" nonsense that defies logic and is hackneyed beyond belief.

and the monsters? puh-lease. x-files stuff. although they make the same rattling noises like the predator. plus, are we to believe that the same monsters that hunt wolves and defy gravity can get their asses whooped at their HOME TERRITORY by a bunch of city chicks in a BMW with a penchant for "extreme" sports? come on. oh, yeah, i forgot - there's that whole "lord of the flies"/"the heart of darkness" angle, where primordial instincts take over and the girls unleash the beast within them (or the beast within us all, ooh!) and turn into fearless survival/killing machines, (***SPOILER!!!***) killing in the process some of their own. gee, now THAT'S a new angle.

there's a "hoax" ending which almost made me retch. but the real ending that follows is one of the only lights in this tunnel (pun intended). like we ever cared for any of the characters. two or three of them are clichéd, the rest are interchangeable.

having said that, "descent" IS better than any of the recent pretty-young-adults Hollywood "horrors", but being better than utter abomination ain't much of an achievement, is it? 3 stars for the absence of pretty but stupid teenagers, and for a semi-decent "build-up" before it all starts falling apart.

bring back the good old days of dread through subtlety!