A solid enough revenge thriller. One I definitely would have made some changes to were I directing it, but it works despite some of the weaknesses. I’ll detail some of that at the end of this review, cause they will be extremely spoiler-laden.

Writing: This is the aspect of the film that comes up shortest. While there’s some nice touches in the characters and dialog, it falls into too many of the standard genre trappings. Compared to the superior recent revenge film, The Brave One, this one comes through as less original or engaging. Still, other factors of this film help make up for said limitations.

Production: Director James Wan, who previously directed Saw and the rather lame looking Dead Silence (he might want to consider something without a Dead title for his next film), does a pretty good job giving the film some style and pacing. While he may not pull off anything revolutionary for the genre, it’s certainly a solid, gritty production. Some of the set design and location filming is a definite plus.

Cast: What can be said of Kevin Bacon in a role like this? He can pull off this kind of thing with ease. While it might not be as good as something like Stir Of Echoes, it’s still a very good performance. Kelly Preston is well cast as his wife. She needs to get more roles these days. Her character isn’t particularly great or original, but she brings a nice quality to the role. John Goodman might be well cast in his role, but it’s so hard to watch the performance and not be distracted by the fact that it’s Goodman performing it. Aisha Tyler is kinda fun as the cop who knows this can’t possibly end well, but has to try and keep things under control anyway. There’s a certain level of amusing frustration in the performance of the character that works pretty well. The actors who play the kids in the family pull things off pretty well. The one aspect of the plot that works least is that of the violent gang, and the actors do very little to distinguish said gang all too much. It’s definitely a weak point of the story and of the casting.

Music: Charlie Clouser, the typical composer for director James Wan, comes through with a hit-and-miss score. While Clouser is usually quite good with material like this, he seems to be doing a good part of this score on genre auto-pilot, hitting things a bit too squarely over the head. The instrumentation leaves a lot to be desired in terms of originality, and the thematic and tonal qualities of the score are pretty average. Not a bad score, but he could have surely done better.

Spoiler Alert: OK, so here’s one change that could have made this one of the coolest movies of the genre, period. There’s a moment where the bad guys suddenly round up and shoot Kevin Bacon’s character and his wife and son, as the camera pans back on them laying on the floor, shot, not moving. I sat there watching, knowing full well that at least Bacon would survive (and I was assuming also his son), but I was musing to myself how stunningly awesome it would be for a movie like this to suddenly take a left turn and hit an abrupt end where the bad guys simply win. It would turn the movie into a fascinatingly original cautionary tale. Sure, there’s no studio in their right mind that would go for that, but it would have been so cool. It would be fun to do a modified edit of the movie that suddenly ends there. While there’s some quality violence in the rampage that follows this scene, it would be a cooler movie if it ended right at that moment.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 22nd, 2007 at 3:41 am and is filed under Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.