Reviews

Well, it shore is pretty. Little reason to watch this implausible movie, unless, like me, you're a fan of Nina Hoss and you like to watch beautiful scenery.

The trip itself is plausible enough. Plenty of fools made their way to Alaska for this second gold rush. There is even another movie (a better movie) about a similar subject called 'The Far Country' with Jimmy Stewart. But what happens along the way, and the way it is plotted and executed is absurd and comical.

Woe if you were a horse in this movie. Or one of the actors forced to speak the stiff dialog. The two main characters, Nina Hoss as Emily and Marco Mandic as Bohmer are believable enough, but tripped up by a silly plot. It's always difficult to make a movie about a long arduous trip without it seeming artificially episodic and here, the director and screenwriter, have failed.

Wow! Where to begin. A truly horrible screenplay. You could use an electron microscope and not fine one true moment, one true piece of dialogue in this movie. How did this movie ever get green lighted? How did three fine actors sign on to act in this movie once they'd read this piece of trash screenplay?

Truly horrible direction from the very beginning. The scene in the limo coming back from the cemetery is stomach turning in its banality, in its falseness. I felt like Susan Sarandon looked away from the camera because she couldn't stand being in the scene. Every camera shot seems wrong. Close ups when they're should be medium shots etc. etc.

Terrible acting. Susan Sarandon and Pierce Brosnan must be truly ashamed to have been in this movie. Carrie Mulligan rises above some of the wretchedness, but even she becomes bogged down in the horror toward the end.

How exactly does Hollywood work that a piece of crap like this can be made, that millions of dollars can be spent on trash? No wonder that the studios are in such a state of disrepair.

I watched this movie mostly to see Carrie Mulligan. She's a special actress with an incredibly expressive face. Sorry that she made the decision to be in it. It tarnishes her resume.

Easily one of the worst movies I've ever seen.

Some plot points discussed. Spoiler alert.

Mesrine seems to have been a very bright sociopath and bank robber and killer. He certainly starts out that way in this movie. The movie opens with Mesrine, played by the magnetic Vincent Cassel, as an interrogator of Algerian rebels during the French/Algerian War (1959). His temperament gets the best of him and he shoots the prisoner.

From there we follow him back to France as he establishes himself as a gangster. Most of this happens much too quickly and without real explanation, which becomes exasperating by the half way point of the movie. Hard to say what the director had in mind. I sense that he didn't really know. Mesrine is definitely charismatic and this shows in his interactions with his lovers (one of whom becomes his wife for long enough to produce three children). His interactions with his friends and associates (particularly Gerard Depardieu) are engaging and a few scenes are truly excellent filmmaking. It's worth seeing the movie just to see Cassel and Depardieu in some of the early scenes.

The episodic nature of the movie and the puzzling motivations of Mesrine become tiresome after a while, and the prison break scenes are so badly filmed they are comical.

Not a horrible film. Worth seeing for some fine acting, but hardly deserving of all the Cesar awards it accumulated. A better director with a better screenplay could have made a memorable film.

With this cast, you'd think, at worst, it would be entertaining. You'd be wrong. John Cusack is horribly miscast. What was he thinking? He doesn't have the acting chops to play a sweaty, leering psychopath. He should stick to parts similar to ones he's played before. Nicole Kidman is too old and too cerebral for her role, and Matthew McConaughey is given little interesting to do. The other characters are unmemorable and pedestrian. The woman who plays the maid efforts were particularly off the mark. And why did Scott Glenn agree to do this movie and what's with those sideburns?

The camera work is often shoddy, jerky for no discernible reason but not as shoddy as the lighting. The actors seem to be mumbling a lot. I presume this is due to poor sound editing, though it could be poor choices on the part of the actors or the director. I never, for an instant, believed the film was taking place in early 60s Florida. The cheap sexual shocks are laughable when not disgusting, and the story poorly told.

I really expected a good movie considering the story, but the director brought few tools to the shoot, and the screenplay was a joke. Maybe the director should go back to film school or watch some other film noirs to see how it's done. I'd suggest 'Out of The Past'. In fact, I'd suggest you movie goers see 'Out of the Past' and skip this miserable offering.

A really bad movie. Pass it by.

A totally predictable movie with a whole lot of fake emotion. Worth watching if you are a big fan of Kevin Kline or Kristan Scott Thomas. Movie starts out poorly with an unbelievable suicide attempt, and gets worse from there. The tone of the movie is all wrong, the music making it more so.

I wish Kevin Kline could get better parts. His talent dwarfs this slick piece of Hollywood hokum. Same goes for Kristan Scott Thomas, although she seems to find good roles in European films.

Certainly, the movie has some humor that rises above most Hollywood fare, but it can't save the movie from its phony and contrived emotional content.

Here's hoping that Kevin Kline and Thomas get roles worthy of their talent.