Saturday, February 9, 2013

An escape from conventional story telling













Danny (Griffin O'Neal) is the son of a famous escape artist who after his father's death tries to follow in his footsteps. He ends up mixed in a scheme with the mayors crazy son Stu (Raul Julia). That's about all I can say about the story without spoiling it too much. Raul Julia does a great job with his role and Griffin O'Neal wasn't bad either. Rest of the cast were fine as well, even though no one really stood up from the crowd despite there being some big names in there as well. Caleb Deschanel is more known as a cinematographer and this is his first feature, unfortunately that shows in the pacing of the movie. It lingers on some shots a bit too much and rushes through others way too quickly. And to be honest the movie doesn't look that great to justify the slow pacing at times. Another thing that bothered me was the story or more how it's told. The motives of the characters are left mostly unexplained and that makes it rather confusing. Like I've always said not everything needs to be told, but really the key motives are quite essential for a good movie. As the movie mixes timelines a bit as well I guess the director saw it as a different way of telling a conventional story. Well different it was but unfortunately not really effective. There are some individual scenes which were absolutely brilliant, but the glue between them seemed to be missing. However I really liked the mood of the movie and the music carried it nicely. That managed to keep my interest up throughout even though in the end it didn't really leave much to go with.
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