I've been a fan of Naomie Harris since she was in White Teeth, and I was interested to see this thriller with her in the lead, even if the trailer and everything I heard about it told me it would be generic at best. Unsurprisingly this is what it was - the type of thriller that you could stop after 15 minutes and pretty much guess the rest. Of course the reason why we know this type of plot is that some films have done it really well and made it a model to be leant on, but not this film. Instead it plays it out in the most obvious way, with little effort in the writing and no twists or turns to even vaguely excite - everything is heavily signposted as if they didn't trust the viewer to get anything by themselves. As it goes where you expect, it delivers enough distracting scenes to manage to get by, but everything is heavy-handed. The title is pretty obvious in its meaning, but it doesn't do anything clever with it, but it leans all over it from the very start. The actual thriller elements are also fairly basic and hard to believe and there was so much scope to be tighter and better.
The blame lies in two very obvious places - writer and director. Neither of them have much in their filmography to be excited about. The writer did Flightpath and Reasonable Doubt - high points in his career but demonstrably not great films. The most notable thing about the director that I can see on his IMDb page is that his PR people wrote his bio - or at least I can't see any other reason why it says that he "is a self-taught, creative genius" when this film suggests he is absolutely not. The main selling point of the film is what brought me to it - the cast. Harris is much, much better than the material deserves; she puts in a lot of effort to show her rage, morality, desperation, but the writing does not help her one bit and too many lines clunk out of her mouth. It hurts because there was a much better film and performance here, and the writing takes it from her. Gibson is a bit better because he has more to work with, although not much. Grillo is reliable as ever, and the rest of the cast are mostly generic cariactures befitting such a generic film.
It distracts and meets the low bar I came to it with, but it doesn't do anything more than that. The cast make it better than it is, but at the same time they are pretty much all wasted here.
The blame lies in two very obvious places - writer and director. Neither of them have much in their filmography to be excited about. The writer did Flightpath and Reasonable Doubt - high points in his career but demonstrably not great films. The most notable thing about the director that I can see on his IMDb page is that his PR people wrote his bio - or at least I can't see any other reason why it says that he "is a self-taught, creative genius" when this film suggests he is absolutely not. The main selling point of the film is what brought me to it - the cast. Harris is much, much better than the material deserves; she puts in a lot of effort to show her rage, morality, desperation, but the writing does not help her one bit and too many lines clunk out of her mouth. It hurts because there was a much better film and performance here, and the writing takes it from her. Gibson is a bit better because he has more to work with, although not much. Grillo is reliable as ever, and the rest of the cast are mostly generic cariactures befitting such a generic film.
It distracts and meets the low bar I came to it with, but it doesn't do anything more than that. The cast make it better than it is, but at the same time they are pretty much all wasted here.