4/10
disappointing
6 January 2006
Warning: Spoilers
Although from a cinematography the production is good, the story and the actors are in doubt. First the story: it is about a kid from a crime family in the deep south that escapes from a deeply agrarian society to the heavily services-oriented north. Well, sorry to tell you, but the deep south as it is mythologized in the Godfather movies, doesn't exist anymore. Everybody has a cellphone now, nobody wants to be a Sheppard anymore, everybody wants to have an office job. The story is highly simplistic and idiomatic, kind of a cute story of a sweet looking kid with bad guys around him. Then the actors: the parents of the kidnapped child are "acting" the part that it is so obvious. When they see the child's school backpack, the knee to it, pick it up, and embrace it. So obvious, that it is classic "B" movie, and so predictable, more for a melodrama aired in soap-opera afternoons. Even how the director directed the shots has some unnatural feel: when the kid emerges from the crypt in the cemetery, he is made to turn his head slightly and then express surprise to discover there is a vehicle. It is as if the kid didn't have peripheral vision. Such scene direction by putting emphasis on frontal screen scape is typical of television direction of simple and uncomplicated easy-to-do productions. To have it here just shows how simplistic that was. But it was the only time it happened, otherwise, the other scenes are more dynamic
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