I watched this largely on the basis of the cast. I like both Andie MacDowell and Cary Elwes. I admit that even just reading the plot outline made me uncomfortable - MacDowell plays a woman whose husband was a murdered white supremacist leader; Elwes plays the man she believed responsible for his death, so she and a couple of cohorts kidnap and seek revenge by torturing him. It sounded pretty brutal and unpleasant, but I do like both MacDowell and Elwes. So I watched it.
It is brutal and unpleasant. The extended opening part dealing with Ethan (Elwes) and his family and his troubles with his landlord seems kind of disconnected from the basic plot, and once Helen (MacDowell) and her team start taking their revenge on Ethan it does become a rather sick and twisted story, becoming even moreso as more and more people get drawn into the plot for revenge.
There's some potentially redeeming quality to this as long as you believe that Ethan really is innocent; a horrible victim of mistaken identity. In the end, though, the (unnecessary in my opinion) plot twist that closes the movie establishes that he really was there when Helen's husband was killed. So he loses much of the sympathy that had been building for him and to me an already unpleasant movie just kind of fizzled out with the concluding scenes.
The fact that a movie is brutal and unpleasant doesn't make it a bad movie. This certainly keeps your attention as you wonder how far the trio of revenge seekers is willing to go, but in the end I just didn't find this to have had any real point or message. When all was said and done, it seemed to have been violence for the sake of violence; brutality for the sake of brutality. It had no redeeming qualities once it was over. It deserves some credit for managing to hold my attention, but it loses a lot for, in the end, leaving me very disappointed and empty. (5/10)
It is brutal and unpleasant. The extended opening part dealing with Ethan (Elwes) and his family and his troubles with his landlord seems kind of disconnected from the basic plot, and once Helen (MacDowell) and her team start taking their revenge on Ethan it does become a rather sick and twisted story, becoming even moreso as more and more people get drawn into the plot for revenge.
There's some potentially redeeming quality to this as long as you believe that Ethan really is innocent; a horrible victim of mistaken identity. In the end, though, the (unnecessary in my opinion) plot twist that closes the movie establishes that he really was there when Helen's husband was killed. So he loses much of the sympathy that had been building for him and to me an already unpleasant movie just kind of fizzled out with the concluding scenes.
The fact that a movie is brutal and unpleasant doesn't make it a bad movie. This certainly keeps your attention as you wonder how far the trio of revenge seekers is willing to go, but in the end I just didn't find this to have had any real point or message. When all was said and done, it seemed to have been violence for the sake of violence; brutality for the sake of brutality. It had no redeeming qualities once it was over. It deserves some credit for managing to hold my attention, but it loses a lot for, in the end, leaving me very disappointed and empty. (5/10)