Film Reviews by AB

A good story theory but in practice this film is quite boring - too many bits and pieces to make it a whole - Helen Mirren tries her hardest to be amusing and light-hearted to bring a counter to the dark side but there is nothing really going for the film. With a wealth of literature available, more could have been made of characters but in reality, nothing came of anything here, with even the denouement being too twee to be believable. Probably aimed at 8 year olds and even then being a limited type of audience

Never been a Stallone fan - he basically cannot act - but this was better than I thought it would be. Not quite worth 3 stars (more like 2.5) but not as bad as I thought it would be but not great either. As usual with goodie v baddie films, implausible and unbelievable in parts but will keep you entertained for its duration

An interesting concept but the storyline of each character has no time to develop in the film, the acting is poor and wooden, no character is worth a second glance and the overall film is extremely disappointing. Too much is made of the mathematics of the problem (and even then it is a leap of faith to understand what is going on). This is probably based on a Star Trek TNG episode when Picard finds himself in a similar situation with unknown characters but he had the brains to figure it all out.

If you rent it, put it on fast forward to save yourself a lot of time

Based on the true life of Frank T Hopkins and his exploits as a long-distance horse racer, this places him and his horse Hidalgo in a race in the Middle East. The result? predictable, preposterous, unbelievable, and the film is overly-long. Also, the film was spoiled by long chunks of dialogue between some of the Arabic characters delivered without translation or subtitles so you had no idea what was going on that even the body language couldn't give away.

From series 1, episode 1 this had everything and it was well-acted, funny, sad, tense, spooky, sexy, and a whole thesaurus full of credits.

Series 4 was very dark, series 5 fun and sad but the whole cast of characters seemed to fully enjoy themselves over the whole 5 series, which came out in their characters.

Full marks to whoever thought this up, whoever wrote it, filmed it, produced it, directed it. A very big "Thank You"

One of the best TV series in the history of the genre.

A film that starts quite boringly, develops into "what if ..." then becomes tense and a bit scary with some heart-stopping moments

First, the negatives.

A tad too long in my view and a bit rambling towards the end when Anthony Hopkins is speaking to the Supreme Court, when it becomes a poor speech in my view, with no real hard-hitting points to be made.

However, the positives

If you want to know how slaves were treated, what they went through, and how they managed to win out in the end, then watch this film. It also helps give a history lesson on how the Civil War was inevitable and what part Europe played in it.

Be warned there are quite upsetting scenes in the film, all of which are based on true events, and then you try and work out why the Americans had slaves when they had the Treaty of Independence stating "that all men are created equal ... with inalienable rights" etc.

Hypocrisy at work

Starts off quite dull, picks up a bit after that and then descends into quite a boring, preposterous effort.

The storyline is quite interesting but there is no suspense in the film and it is very hard to believe that an IT expert an a biologist can win a car chase (that goes on a bit too long); survive all the bullets being shot at them, and win the day.

Disappointed with the film and Uma Thurman is a waste of space in this as her acting is so wooden, as if she doesn't want to be there.

If anything, I would say avoid rather than watch

Cage must have needed the money for he is not suited for the part of a grief-stricken father - not much grief, not much anger, too easy to play it cool while he looks for his daughter's kidnappers. Body count far too high before cops even *think* about doing something and then they are useless.

Fills a couple of hours but is overly violent in places to be enjoyable

Still enjoy watching this film after so many years - great storyline (if a bit stretched to believe that Faye D would help the hero they way she does and how easily he gets to access Bell Telephone Labs, Hotel telephone exchanges and a top spy's house) but history has shown that the reasons behind the whole raison d'etre of the murders are plausible and indeed semi-true (despite some political denials over the Middle East!).

Max von Sidow is an early incarnation of Javier Bardem in No Country For Old Men and shows how character acting should be done.

This was an early Arnie film and it shows - far too dated, far too formulaic, poor storyline and poor acting. Also suffers from the pretentious fact that the first 15 minutes is completely in Russian with no subtitles or explanation. Sorry, but I cannot recommend this at all