Great topic, great acting, poor film

Rating: 5/10 (8 January 2014)

Maximum spoilers alert.
I thought this film was pretty bad. The acting was fantastic - full credit to the cast - but the way the story was conveyed was amateurish at best. The whole family/freedom thing played about a 3-5 minute role in a film of 2 hours and 15 minutes - and there was no 'pre-kidnap' development of the character to humanise him and let you empathise with him. When it should have been fast, it was slow, and when it should have been slow, it was fast.
A remake of this should have ~30 minutes at the start just to ease into the film and develop the character, and let the audience really empathise with what he was losing in life. Key scenes later on were good but were cut with too many filler scenes to be fully utilised. The ending was also quite anti-climatic, leaving the reunion too brief to even qualify for 'brief but sweet'.
It's saddening as this post will probably be taken as some racist hatred thing, when in fact it's just a review of the director. This film could have been so much better, but sadly this is an opportunity missed.