Too Real To Be Entertaining

Rating: 6/10 (29 April 2019)

Well made but ultimately disappointing because it defies the expectations for this kind of movie. John McClane never shows up, and we aren't even given the kind of desperate, suicidal resistance of the passengers in United 93. Instead, the characters with which the American audience identifies -- which is to say the rich, mostly Western, mostly white ones -- behave all too much like real life. They sneak about in fear and confusion, and when caught by the frighteningly well supplied murderers, they are either killed outright or herded about passively at gunpoint. The only act of defiance by one is late and futile. The guests who survive do so mostly by chance or by slipping out the back way pointed out by the Indian staff.
The movie does make the young murderers seem human without "humanizing" them. Through the cell phone voice of their commander safe in Pakistan, we are never in any doubt that they are driven by seething resentment and have been thoroughly taught to see all non-Muslims as subhumans to be killed without remorse. Nonetheless, small bits of business show them to be all too believable young men rather than robots. One plays a practical joke on his partner involving room service food. Another is such a puritan that, despite his commander's orders, he can't bring himself to put his hand inside the bra of a woman he has murdered in order to retrieve her identity papers. A third calls his family on the cell phone -- they are proud of what he is doing, he is concerned that they haven't yet been paid the money they were promised for him doing it. We are reminded that they are all too human.