jb0579

My A$$ Nicholas Cage has a retirement plan. He will star in his own embalming video: "This fluid is colder than my blood and smells bad but I guess that's what ppl do....... anyway it's seeping into my cranium now so gotta run. Think of me come Oscar & Golden (plated) Globe time! It was great staying active so long!! I SHOULD HAVE won something for Raising Arizona, & didn't. Shouldn't have won for leaving Los Vegas, although Elizabeth Shue should have. "The Golden (plated) Globes and Oscars should be talent/performance-based, NOT a popularity contest. In all seriousness this movie was funny for Nic Cage standards. He can be anything from outstanding to horse-dookie depending on the script and direction. For example watch "City of Angels" in which he (and Meg Ryan) made a far reaching sctript into an emotional, into genius work.

I dunno - it's the same type of thing he puts out a half dozen times a year. Watch at own risk.

Absolutely one of the most silly nonsensical horrible waste of time movies I've ever seen. It's too bad because the performances weren't necessarily bad, but it was poorly lit so it was hard to see and some of the premise of the film are nonsensical. If you're looking for something to watch I don't think this would be my good choice. It's about a pair of siblings, brother and sister, who while on the highway decided to pull over here shouting noise from a large field of grass adjacent to the highway. The hearing young boys voice yelling for them to help so they jump into the woods and realize that they've gotten themselves anyway cauldron of never-ending grass stalks and get lost. Then there is this silly Time Warp thing that happens where they're dead and then they're alive again and then they're dead again and then there are alive again and then they're dead again, I believe what I was seeing. Don't go there.

Embarrassingly poor copy of a Silence of the Lambs or Seven type of movie, especially the former, but with B-movie performances and direction.

Malkovich almost always delivers, and one can sense how powerful his performance would've been with accomplished co-stars and screenplay. As it was, the lines seemed forced and the actors seemed unbelievable, as if the editors used the first take of every scene. If you've ever seen a movie in which you felt that 4 hours of material was jammed into 124 minutes by actors that somehow don't seem credible, that's what we have here.

Lawrence is better than I expected, but still far from being able to pull something like this off. At least I can finally watch him in a performance other than his usual subpar slapstick schtik and actually measure his performance on a more accomplished scale; but still - he's got a long way to go.

Rozburgh, an actress with whom I was heretofore only vaguely familiar, was okay; more credible in her performance than Lawrence but also a far cry from Jodie Foster's Clarice Starling in "Silence of the Lambs" or even Monica Potter's part in "Along Comes a Spider," only without the polish.

Malkovich, lastly, was his normal creepy self; hanging on the the last consonant in the words that make his sentences. He plays essentially the same psycho in every movie wherein he's tasked to do so, yet he does it so deliciously that, for me at least, I'm still not entirely sick of it.

In the end I was embarrassed for the whole lot of them. The formula of wounded cops having to play give and take to bribe answers from a madman has been done to death (pardon the phrase), and, frankly, it won't in my opinion ever be done as well as the Hannibal Lecter character. If think of a scale where "Silence" was the "gold" standard, think of this movie as the used and reused aluminum foil standard, with yesterday's rotten found food dried on one side crumpled up in the garbage. The religious subtext and corny twist is just not the makings of a good, solid, gritty crime thriller. I give it a shaky C-.