Reviews

A more stylish movie you are unlikely to see.

However, 2 hours of gorgeous sets and costumes is scant compensation for sitting through Baldwin's wooden acting, and a plot which manages to be both contrived and obvious at the same time.

Given its considerable legacy, The Shadow deserved better treatment than this.

Director Russell Mulcahy was once an innovative music video director. This movie (when viewed in context of his forgettable 'Razorback') prove he his a terminal lack of attention span for anything which requires more than 5 minutes of coherent screen time and filling more substantive than eye candy.

Finally, let me record my astonishment that anyone on IPDB could rate this movie highly. Unless of course they are covert PR agents for the studios. Best we check their ring fingers ;-)

I am astonished that this woeful movie garnered an average score of 6.7 out of 10 on IMDb...!

For a movie about writers and writing, the script is particularly predictable and turgid. I am not sure what was worse - the relentless inevitability of the completely obvious happy ending, or the clichéd romantic subplot.

Keitel was clearly enjoying his holiday in Tuscany a little too much, with a performance that was at best, 'very relaxed'. Joshua Jackson, however, sounded like he was reading the script for the first time. And as for Claire Forlani ... "look, mum, I'm not just pretty, I'm ACTING!"

If you're ever forced to watch this movie, turn the sound down. That way you can enjoy the movie's only asset - its Tuscan setting - without needing to hear Keitel's character, allegedly a grand master of literature, reciting prose so clumsy it would have earned a creative writing sophomore a 'D' on their term paper.

As a premise, this backwoods version of the Dead Calm storyline had promise.

However, director Eric Red's inability to render a convincing hurricane leads to a deluge of continuity and lighting errors.

Ultimately, the viewer is more spellbound by the bizarre weather effects than the intended storyline. Intermittent spates of ham-fisted over-direction are similarly distracting.

Charles Dance, doing an 'inbred backwoods hardass' schtick, does his best to save the movie. But ultimately, Undertow squeals like a pig ... and has more ham to boot.