One man rescues\/saves another man from suicide. The acting is terrific by both actors. Inspite of the good man's effort to inspire the other man to be a better person. Neither changes each other.
If shoot-'em-up, gobble-'em-down movies like The Fugitive and Jurassic Park are rated PG-13 these days, what does an R-rated action adventure look like? Like True Romance: violent to a fault, glam to the max.
This movie may start out slow, but it builds, and the star power increases as well. It has everything going for it, and by its end you would likely be surprised at how absorbing it was. It accomplishes it without nudity - enjoy . . .
Intentional low camp always seems wrong unless it's very funny; in trash, one wants clumsiness, even a certain tackiness, and this movie has the production values and the high-tech fluency of a much bigger movie.
- New Yorker, 2006-08-28
All those CGI snakes can be quite shudder-inducing. But there is also something cheerfully ridiculous in the way the film switches to rubber snakes for hand-to-hand combat.
With all these superlatives, how could Shyamalan so badly misjudge vital elements to the story? The melodramatic elements take away substantially from much of what could otherwise be hailed as a masterpiece.
Cage is the only actor allowed to do riffs on his assigned part, something he takes full advantage of; the others are stuck with their two-dimensional satirical profiles, which grow increasingly tiresome and unyielding.
What keeps the whole thing from toppling into an abyss of unwatchable TV drama histrionics is a pair of dynamite performances from Annette Bening and Naomi Watts.
An efficient cop thriller, with a charismatic performance from Roundtree as "the cat that won't cop out when there's danger all about...Shaft!" Can you dig it?
