arthur_tafero In a hopeless quest to get rid of his sensitive, good-guy image, Adrien Brody makes a terrible mistake in his career with this turkey. I am a big fan of Adrien Brody, but this is like Cary Grant trying to put over a role as a serial killer. It is just not a believable premise, considering the actor. After viewing this film, you may need oxygen (and a shower).The plot is not that original either; it was done much better on TV shows like Top Cops, and CSI The complete script is totally unrealistic, and has very little to do with either the criminal intent to make money or psychological need to show how smart and clever one could be. As a fantasy piece (and it is a complete fantasy piece), it fails miserably from satisfying more than 99% of the viewers out there. Can Adrien Brody play against type? The answer is no.

voluptas I know I'm late in the game, but I just watched the movie for the first time last night. Wow. At first I couldn't believe how bad the writing and the acting was, but then I started to laugh. This movie is no thriller ... it's a tongue-in-cheek, dark comedy cop spoof! After I realized what it was, I was amazed! Brilliant! Mistakes made this movie even better, such as the same gun being used in all the scenes (bad guys and good guys using the same REVOLVER); paint spatters on the kidnapper's boots that were there in the beginning but should not have been there until near the end; the car door that was smashed BEFORE the car chase and subsequent collisions, the fact that Brody was wearing a necklace in the last scene, long after the cops took away anything that could have been used to harm the interviewer during the "private" interview ... these types of hilarious flaws merely added to the genius of this movie. Then there were the absurd scenes that made me laugh out loud. For example, the FBI agent returning a nearly empty book of matches to the detective that Brody, the CRIMINAL, claims he stole from her. Why would an FBI agent take the time to do that? Why wouldn't an FBI agent consider the possibility that Brody could have placed a message inside (which he did)!!! Even the characters, IN THE MOVIE, commented about that being "weird." Or the FBI agent's rant about the death penalty that was so over the top that even Brody's character had to say how stupid it was? And the crazy still shots of the seemingly not-at-all upset husband, looking small and forlorn? It was one crazy scene after another, all done with very artsy angles and composition (remember the cop reflected in the criminal's eye?) Or, how about when the cops were checking Brody's teeth before the interview? And constant Great use of color in every scene.The writer and director are seriously gifted. This movie should have won a ton of awards.

Robert J. Maxwell I was impressed when I first saw this. Not only is the story packed with suspense -- a kidnapped woman has been buried with a day's worth of air and it's the cops' job to find out where she is before she suffocates -- but the performances are better than what we've come to expect from yarns about the police. Furthermore, not ONCE is detective Maura Tierney asked to hand over her badge and gun! In fact, Maura Tierney is quite alright. She's a decent actress and she's right for the part of a policewoman so guilt-ridden that she has a secret lover who burns her with cigarettes and otherwise torments her. She's not a glamor puss either and I liked that too. Julia Roberts would have spoiled it, not through any lack of talent but simply because of her refulgent beauty.Adrian Brody was a big surprise too. He's the character who buried the young woman alive, killed his accomplice for no particular reason, and now sits in the interrogation room being alternately bullied and cosseted by the police and the FBI in order to get him to squeal about the victim's burial place. He has the face of a Dead End Kid and the whining, contemptuous demeanor of a spoiled brat. It's a hoot when the FBI takes over the case, the menacing agent enters the room, surveys the iron-bound Brody, and goes into this detailed spiel about how horrible it is to die from a lethal injection. Brody listens impassively for a few minutes then looks up with a twisted smile and remarks, "What a stupid monologue." It's all so taut that you get caught up in the story, but it doesn't hold up well on a second viewing. First, you can't help noticing that there is a formulaic car chase through the streets of Manhattan and that it's lifted straight out of "The French Connection". The two drivers glare at each other and try to bump each other's car off the street, while angrily yanking at the wheel.Then you notice that, as a matter of fact, the whole film is modeled on "The Silence of the Lambs." Brody is a proletarian Hannibal Lecter -- smart, savvy, able to scan others for their weaknesses and then exploit them, an escape artist of a high degree. He teases the hell out of the cops, especially Maura Tierney. He promises to give her some hints if she'll tell him how she came by those cigarette burns on her arms.The problem is that Hannibal Lecter had a genuine reason for probing Jody Foster's psyche. He'd been penned up in solitary for years. And his curiosity was boundless. I mean, you MUST have curiosity as well as brains to endure the grueling routine of medical school, then psych internship, then years of private practice. But Brody's villain has no such motivation. He's as clever as a sewer rat but what does he get out of Maura Tierney's confession? Unlike Jody Foster's Big Reveal about the slaughter of the lambs, Tierney's isn't even particularly interesting. It's written flatly and Tierney doesn't bring it off.There's another thing that impressed me as slightly off on a second viewing. Maura Tierney commits homicide. She holds a gun on Brody, lying helpless in a pit, and she decides to bury him alive so she starts kicking dirt into the hole. But in the face of Brody's feculent mocking -- "Oh, yeah, bury me, gimme more, MORE!" -- she shoots him in the chest and kills him. That's not acting as an agent of justice. That's revenging yourself on someone for reasons of personal hatred, and it's usually called "murder."

caa821 This is a pretty fair "neo-noir" presentation, which I'd missed hearing about during the nine years since its release - but found in my paper's local-edition weekly t.v. listings. They only gave it 1-1/2*'s, but noticing that Adrien Brody and Maura Tierney were in the cast, I decided to take a look. One of the best aspects of this flick is the character each represents - two of the most weirdly fascinating, this side of Dennis Hopper and his companions "Blue Velvet," or the cult classic Rory Calhoun opus, "Motel Hell." Brody as the youthful, sort of nerdy-yet-wicked, braces-wearing, nefarious villain; and Tierney as the competent, dedicated, tough detective, with her strange compulsive, secretive nocturnal predilections, sort of a "masochistic savant." Perhaps not great, and with some contrasting moments. Sometimes the cops here were more realistic and "low-key" than in most of this type of movie fare, and at others were the types of doophuses we see regularly, enforcing the law, in these flicks.All-in-all, a good 7* presentation, and not a bad way to spend the two hours' viewing.As a sort of imaginary "sub-plot" I couldn't help visualizing from early-on, I was hoping that Brody and Tierney might meet-up at some point - the confrontation between the quintessential sadist and masochist, respectively. I thought of dialog between them, replicating a joke I once heard: the masochist says to the sadist, "Hit me!" (or, alternatively, "Hurt me!"). The sadist replies, "NO!!" (When they finally met in the interrogation room, there were a couple of occasions when I thought this just might occur.)