Reviews

The good: I have to respect the pureness of this film - everything is in service of making Liam Neeson's character more heroic. Every other character encountered, with the exception of his friends and the pop star, is somewhat to excruciatingly terrible. He is always the most bad-ass, always right, always righteous.

The bad: His ex-wife a shrew, the daughter sweet but vapid, the stepfather a caricature of a sugar daddy are the set up, and it just gets worse from there. Meanwhile, the hero, after heroically serving his country, heroically quit his job to be closer to his daughter, and his sacrifice has been woefully unappreciated.

The implausible: No matter how good he is at what he does, it makes no sense how quickly he's able to carve his way through the cretins of Paris with absolutely no help from anyone. Also, I can't understand the business model of these Albanians - how is it more economical to prey on rich tourists with connections than on the poor and vulnerable? If rich (white) tourists are going missing from Paris every day, people will notice and their relatives will certainly make the French police take it seriously.

The excruciating: It was obvious Amanda would not make it through the movie the moment she coyly suggested sleeping with a strange man - and her death went largely without emotional effect. The daughter, the virgin, after being rescued, seems to suffer no trauma or grief. She's been saved by the hero, so she's totally fine.

There is clearly a market for this kind of schmaltzy action, but my eyes are tired of rolling, so I won't be watching the sequels.

Just because a movie is shot artfully and scenes are drawn out way longer than necessary, doesn't make it good. I liked the sepia/color switch at first, but by the end the back and forth just became distracting. Because there were so many looong scenes of people walking slowly (supposedly to increase the suspense, but I lost my patience for this strategy long ago), it allowed me to start nitpicking a few things.

The sound effects are absolutely terrible and do not match what is happening on scene (why are his footsteps so echo-ey when he's out in the open???), and the vocals seem to be dubbed as the lips don't match exactly. I also often could not tell who was speaking. The makeup effect Tarkovsky seems to like where the skin around the hero's eyes gets increasingly dried out as the movie goes on, which seems to be aimed at underlining his exhaustion, makes no sense here as the atmosphere is quite moist and he even had a nap in the middle! These are things I wouldn't notice if my attention was captured, but since so many scenes dragged on, they started to annoy me more and more.

The point of the movie seems to be that men should learn to be happy with what they have, which is fine, but women are specifically excluded from the thesis, as he refuses to take women to the room where desires are grants for some unstated reason. The glimpses at the end of the stalker's wife and daughter were actually the most interesting scenes and made me wish they were used more in the bulk of the movie. It also would have been more interesting if there was more dialogue and less monologue. The monologues ended up sounding disconnected and self-indulgent to me, since there were so many.

For a movie where literally, nothing happens, the length was not earned, in my opinion. If it had been cut by an hour, I would probably have given it 5 or 6 stars for cinematography and decent acting. As it is, I cannot recommend it.