Reviews

There is approximately 15 minutes of this movie that are strong, emotional but not sentimental. And all 15 of them are inhabited by Tom Hiddleston and Benedict Cumberbatch. Way better performances than this movie deserves, masterful and real. The only part that doesn't drag and doesn't feel tepid.

The movie is, however, exactly what I have expected, sentimental, too clean and over the top, war for kids. What I did not expect was disjointed story without the point, that comes into focus and delivers some true drama only in those 15 mentioned minutes. Just look at Hiddlestones face in those last moments we see him.

No one bothered to decide if this was a kids movie about a brave horse, or true war drama. It fails in both respects. Spielberg likes clean universes (how did Private Ryan happen?) for his stories, he cleans them up until they feel sterile. For some stories it works. For most, it does not. This movie leaves you waiting for the true drama to start. The horse and the boy have never been in any kind of danger. The connection they had wasn't so much in the chemistry as it was spoken out. And that holds for mostly everyone facing Joey. It feels like without musical cues (straight out of 50s melodramas, and completely outdated) you would never know what you are supposed to feel. Not that it renders more than awww factor at any point.

I had to check this one out, being a huge fan of James Spader. However, if you are setting a villain based on his nationality and religion, don't get all your basic facts wrong like last name of the main character (not Serbian), and there is nothing in Serbian Orthodox cannon that forbids tattoos , on the contrary, they can be quite religious. That is to start with. Unfortunately, this means that I can not really get into this show, nor appreciate writing and the plot, since I am familiar with lots of misrepresented facts...

The tone and the pace are generally nothing new, a bit forcefully dark and resembling Damages a shade to much.

However, James Spader.