This movie reminds me more of Abel Ferrara's MS 45 than anything else. Also, it achieves the impossible: I no longer have the slightest interest in seeing Olga Kurylenko naked.
I rated this flicker higher than I normally would, partly because it's a character study grafted onto a shoot 'em up, a sort of sub-genre I'm a sucker for, and mostly for Kurylenko's visceral performance. The action elements are rote and banal; the real interest here is the interplay between the two female characters.
Ultimately, despite the tiresome elements, it worked for me as a brutal indictment of the treatment of women in patriarchal societies, of which modern Israel is as guilty as many other supposedly less enlightened places. The crucial opening scene is, I hate to say, dead on and made me cringe; the only change I would have made was turning the Semitic-appearing men into pasty dimwits from New Jersey in Israel on 'religious study'.
Most people don't know Israel, particularly Tel Aviv, is a major trafficking point, with the usual merchandise, i. e. poverty-stricken Ukrainian and Moldovian women. Knowing Kurylenko's background (provincial Ukrainian), her performance makes more sense, and is a stunner; I think personally the inconsistencies in her acting are due more to a scatter-shot script than her own skills; although, I gotta question whether she was actually 'acting' as such. This movie and role had to, had to, hit home for Kurylenko. She pulls a scary performance out of her stylish leather coat.
Personally, for me, I've spent time around these people in real life; and the guys are just as bafflingly evil as depicted in this movie, the women just as bafflingly confused. The subject material is depressing in the extreme, I guess. The moment where this movie hit me is a scene on a bus, in which Kurylenko is either scrubbed of makeup or made up to look that way; and I realized with a shock she is a dead ringer for someone I once met in real life, right down to the clothes. That woman is now undoubtedly dead.
Watch it for the schizoid movie it is: half popcorn, half deadly serious.
I rated this flicker higher than I normally would, partly because it's a character study grafted onto a shoot 'em up, a sort of sub-genre I'm a sucker for, and mostly for Kurylenko's visceral performance. The action elements are rote and banal; the real interest here is the interplay between the two female characters.
Ultimately, despite the tiresome elements, it worked for me as a brutal indictment of the treatment of women in patriarchal societies, of which modern Israel is as guilty as many other supposedly less enlightened places. The crucial opening scene is, I hate to say, dead on and made me cringe; the only change I would have made was turning the Semitic-appearing men into pasty dimwits from New Jersey in Israel on 'religious study'.
Most people don't know Israel, particularly Tel Aviv, is a major trafficking point, with the usual merchandise, i. e. poverty-stricken Ukrainian and Moldovian women. Knowing Kurylenko's background (provincial Ukrainian), her performance makes more sense, and is a stunner; I think personally the inconsistencies in her acting are due more to a scatter-shot script than her own skills; although, I gotta question whether she was actually 'acting' as such. This movie and role had to, had to, hit home for Kurylenko. She pulls a scary performance out of her stylish leather coat.
Personally, for me, I've spent time around these people in real life; and the guys are just as bafflingly evil as depicted in this movie, the women just as bafflingly confused. The subject material is depressing in the extreme, I guess. The moment where this movie hit me is a scene on a bus, in which Kurylenko is either scrubbed of makeup or made up to look that way; and I realized with a shock she is a dead ringer for someone I once met in real life, right down to the clothes. That woman is now undoubtedly dead.
Watch it for the schizoid movie it is: half popcorn, half deadly serious.