Betrayal of Men

Rating: 1/10 (4 January 2008)

This film seems to have received incredible high praise and is currently listed in the Top250 of this website. I hate to fly in the face of such adoration, but this film left me completely indifferent and rather irritated if not highly annoyed. Sure, there are a few nice setpieces, but it's all set against a hack-handed background rendering them only a mild distraction from the otherwise continuous amazement at the film's triteness and mindboggling illogical plotpoints. The film is poorly structured and almost entirely if not completely un-engaging with the most lame and sappy ending I have ever seen to a film.
This film is supposed to be full of big ideas on Britain's dystopian future and the reactions of the public to an infertility plagued society. Angry youth throwing rocks at trains, the rails to Auschwitz have been reopened and are deporting the fugees (not the band) back to where they came from (hell) and even the spectrum of light is somehow compromised*. With this kind of background, you'd expect the movie to actually focus on any of it, something which this movie is acclaimed for. But apart from the main characters being in a bad mood for 90 brief minutes, there is surprisingly little this movie reflects on. The exposition on these theme's was simply replaced by endless shots of people being deported Nazi-style, the English countryside and mind-numbing dialog that was doing little else than driving the weary plot onward. The whole infertility and the world-gone-to-hell themes could just as well have been left out entirely and it wouldn't have made any difference to the actual storyline of two people on the run.
*Truly Amazing that someone would spent enormous amounts of money on expensive filming equipment only to make the actual picture look like it was shot by my Uncle Fred (who has Parkinson's) who just got his Handicam yesterday for Christmas and is still working his way through the manual which is written in Chinese and which apparently only describes how to deprive the picture of colour.
In Children of men subtlety was not allowed. Everything is as bad as bad comes and even good is apparently bad. The sets look over the top sleazy, our main characters are anything but likable, a pasture of grazing cows has been replaced by a smouldering pile of meat and bones, the rebels simply kill their leader over a dispute or kill policemen when they turn up at the wrong place at the wrong time. The overemphasized way of portraying such a dull and drab doomsday landscape as was done in Children of Men, surely would bother anyone who is not into cartoonistic film-making but in stead likes some subtlety on any subject matter if indeed this is presented in a serious movie. Maybe I misunderstood, but I believed that's what this movie was.
Meanwhile in the film, the script is pretty awful. Caine certainly tries his utmost with it, but his lines are one-note and much too viewer-informative only to result in a feeling of 'we get it already, move on please..". Owen is his usual wooden self and thus type-casted perfectly in the role of Theo Faron, a morose lower government official who couldn't give a fart about anything. Although I really liked his performance, his character is screenplayed terribly and I couldn't give an equal fart about his fate in the movie. Next up a utterly forgettable cameo by Julianne Moore, some B-actors to play the bad guys lead by Chiwetel Ejiofor who since his performance in Serenity for me lost all credibility as an actor. And newcomer Claire Hope Ashity as the Black Virgin Mary who does little more than swear a lot, which by modern standards, is apparently good enough for a 'solid performance' in the books of the critics. Frankly, her performance wouldn't even cut it on Eastenders.
The story in Children of Men is practically non-existent and covered not much more than an action packed chase from the old peril to the land of deliverance. But this was done on purpose to not loose focus on the sublime messages it miserably failed to communicate because they forgot to include them. As a result many of the scenes drag relentlessly while jarring opera music and a hate-crime of a muzak cover-version of 'Ruby Tuesday' plundered that what was left of the viewer's will to live. Indeed, it's really all that bleak and pointless. But intentionally so! The end result of all this is an aesthetic crime against the art-loving moviegoer or the one with more than 2 brain cells to rub together.
The end result is also one that is critically acclaimed by nothing less than the entire society of professional movie critics minus one or two who probably didn't receive the letter which stated they would get a nice percentage of the movie's revenues when their review would be kind. Seriously, you'd think all these glowing reviews and those on this website, were written by people who had somehow managed to miss the entirety of Western cinema.
The gourmet-fare that is Children of men is actually a night out at the McDonald's of film-making where the second bite of your food is already spoiling the experience of the first. Let us all gather in prayer and hope that there won't be a sequel. Unless the sequel was already made when they created 'Shoot Em Up'. Another highly creative movie in which mr. Owen is once again protecting a baby that people are trying to kill.
Evy