Film Reviews by JH

Could only manage to watch 15 minutes before the sheer vapidness of the storyline overwhelmed me. If a film doesn't pull you in by then, it has no right to make you stick with it. But the characters were shallow and the storyline boring. Maybe the director thought the initial soft porn angle would hold the audience until the story developed, but without some sort of hook, the level of interest waned rapidly until I just turned it off.

Firstly, this film could easily be cut by half an hour with no loss to the storyline. And what a storyline. Like the latest "Knives Out" film it tried to mix humour with seriousness without the necessary lead ins. Names like Perfidia should give you a clue to her character. Lockjaw (stretching believability). Presumably the name of the secret society was meant to be a joke. The really annoying plinky plonky background music at one point went on far too long and forced me into just using the subtitles. Couldn't work out whether Sean Penn's character was meant to be taken seriously or not. I was quite shocked to see such a good actor brought low in this role. And (spoiler alert) when he reappears after apparently having been checked twice to be dead, I laughed out loud. Was that meant to be funny ? Like the whole film, I never worked out what how we were supposed to take it.

Any good film should grab you in the first 15 mins. I gave this 20 then gave up. Perhaps it gets better later on but the acting was melodramatic with nothing subtle to redeem it. The face to camera shots were overdone. Got a feeling that the rest of the film was probably gratuitous violence to give it some renown . The first "All Quiet on the Western Front" film from 1930 was better than this.