A twisted little revenge story, kind of like Last House on the Left. Stars Erika Christensen and Jesse Metcalfe.
The story: a couple's son is kidnapped and killed. The killer is sent to prison, but that isn't enough for the couple so they break him out so they can capture him and inflict on him the sort of torture that their son felt.
Was it good?
Not really. I, personally, am not a pro-torture sort of guy, so the whole premise didn't really capture me. I understand that if someone killed someone close to me that I would want to torture them, but it's not something I hope I would follow through with. I mean, what's the point? We all know we'd want revenge...but so what? Their revenge is so over-the-top that it isn't cathartic. It's just watching them devolve into torturers themselves. One good thing the movie did (that a not of amatuer scripts I've read don't do), is that they have the characters switch. At first the dad is hesitant about doing this and the wife is pushing him, but then it is the wife who gets squeemish about what they are doing (much like in Macbeth). That was a nice character twist.The other problem is the plot which relies on a lot of coincidences. They just pile up and up until they become completely unbelievable. And then there is the ridiculous plot twist at the end. I won't give it away (although you can check the IMDB message boards if you want to know it), but it undercuts the whole story. It's like they threw in a plot twist.
So a moment about end twists. These have become popular ever since SIXTH SENSE, but most of the time people screw them up because they think that if they just throw in a bog twist it'll be cool but they don't understand why it worked in 6S. In 6S, Bruce Willis wants to talk to his wife. After a pateint committed suicide, he has spiraled into depression and thinks that's the reason for all the problems between them. He meets Cole, who has the same problems as the patient who committed suicide, and thinks if he can just help this kid he can fix things with his wife. Now you could tell that story straight with no twist and it could be a powerful and moving story. The twist, finding out that Bruce Willis is really dead/a ghost, just elevates everything. Instead of the problems with his wife being about his depression, they are because he isn't there. Instead of his wife being mad at him, she is grieving for him. It's not that it just changes what we thought we knew -- but it amplifies it. And remember, this comes after he has helped the boy -- he thinks he's won, that he's saved the day and everything will be okay. And then it is snatched away. It's powerful and heartbreaking moment when he realizes it, and yet it let's him pass on and so his wife can get on with her life too. It works because it doesn't cancel everything that's happened before -- it elevates it.
This movie...first, I'm not sure what the movie was really dealing with other than the fact that these people wnat to torture the man who killed their son (which is understandable but why make a movie out of it?)...then the twist...yeah, it changes what you thought of the movie but it also ruins anything that had been building.
The movie had some interesing things, but just didn't do enough interesting things, didn't have anything to say, and the final plot twist just undercut what good things there had been.
***AVOID ****
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