Reviews

Among all the people here at IMDb who voted that this movie was a great horror film, I have one thing to ask: are you serious? Does watching people getting beheaded, knives shoved and stomped through their throats, spikes thrown their heads only to be slowly pulled out, burned and solidified into hot wax only to have their skin pulled off later on, not bother you? This level of wanton sadism is POINTLESS. Perhaps I stand wrong with this crowd: we live in an instant coffee generation: instant thrills supersede other things like, say, plot and character development. This movie is hyper violent, gratuitous in its approach to sadism and gore.

Kim Basinger gives a great performance as a completely nerve-wracked, overwrought kidnapped biology teacher Chris Evans' character is too goofy and slapstick in comparison with Basinger's character. While she's begging for him to help her, his delivery of one liners just doesn't match with the atmosphere she delivers.

Another oversight lies in Evans' character which does not add up. In several acts of desperation, he first steals a car, drives it through a construction yard, holds up a phone company at gunpoint yet manages to park the car somewhere and listen in on what is happening at the other end of the line. There needs to be some modicum of reality - most likely one where the police are out looking for him.

Secondly, if he were to have brought a phone to the police, any kidnapping would have been treated as a #1 priority and not merely scribbled down on some notepad to be looked upon later as the police officer signs off for the day.

The director needs to decide what he wants to stick with. IF it's a tense thriller then casting Evans was a mistake because his character simply does not gel with Basinger's more serious one.

Had there been more of a synthesis between reality and characters, less comic crap from Evans and more reality involving police work, then this could have been more of a thriller.

Just finished watching Nid de Guepes, or the Nest, as it is translated. The beginning I found to be somewhat slow - there is very little dialogue until the sh@t starts to fly in the building. However, I found myself drawn to whether or not and more importantly who would make it out alive.

Overall, for an action movie, it was good - no hero machismo, no action stars . The one and only rescue attempt made (in the truck) is put to rest within a matter of seconds in a hail of bullets; something you don't see quite often in a typical Hollywood blockbuster.

There are no heroes, no guns for glory. It simply tells the story of a group of people, thrown into the same "merde", fighting to survive. Whatever remains of the bravado is quickly put to an end as you see how high the odds were stacked against them - the continuous legion of gunmen assaulting the factory in droves.

Not to mention Fares, switching from French, to Italian to English without missing a beat. Rrrroow.

A good flick

I have seen this movie far too many times, and still I am touched by its depth, emotion and underlying message. I caught it at the International Film Festival in Toronto, and after 5 minutes of standing ovations, people left really content.

This is an absolute gem of a movie. Kitano manages to convey a weighty and heart-felt message through his character, who is a laconic police officer caught up in a complicated mix of Yakuza dealings and personal grief regarding his work and home situation. Kitano also displays another aspect that is stunning: his artwork. From what I've heard, all of the artwork displayed throughout the movie, depicting the various animals and flowers, are of his own hand, drawn while he remained hospitalized in a bike accident.

A must see movie.