Disappointing

Rating: 3/10 (7 March 2006)

I've just watched Hostel and I am very very disappointed. The concept has potential, but the result is so poor. Not a single character is developed. The plot has almost an hour of unuseful premises. The kidnapping/torture/killing business could have been made plausibile, but it has not and it looks like a public fair, without any need to keep it hidden from any possible investigations. The whole context is totally unrealistic. Finally, the end is very predictable and banal. As regards the core of the movie, the torture scenes are not disturbing as you would expect from a movie like this. Last week, I have seen Syriana: there is a single torture scene, which is enormously more effective than all the Hostel gore. If Takeshi Miike and Quentin Tarantino are Eli Roth's torture-scenes masters, well he hasn't learned the lesson.