Useless "lone plot twist" movie

Rating: 4/10 (4 October 2011)

It started well, though. Mysterious last will and testament with missions to accomplish... Adorable french Canadian accent (I'm french, I love what our cousins have done with our common language ). A Quebec thriller, yeah !
Rapidly, first eyebrow raisers... What Arab place are they talking about like everyone should know about it ? Never heard of it...
Then you realize the Arab country they are going to is just an archetypal Arab country, non existent. A caricature of many seen-on-TV Arab countries... OK, why not, I suppose Americans (as people living on the American continent) have a lesser history burn with Arab countries than Frenchs, for example, do, and have no problem building a make-believe Arab country just for the sake of... what? At this point, I supposed the filmmakers wanted to make some point about Arab or religious wars... or terrorism... ? Since they are Canadians, not Unitedstatesians, I was hoping maybe for a not so obvious / good vs bad kind of story... But I was really wondering what was the purpose of all that.
The story goes on, civil war, religious war, slaughter, all fake, all archetypal, OK, but to what end? What's the point?
And then, you finally get the answer, at the end of the movie, with one unforeseen big plot twist.
And then you realize the Arab story is absolutely irrelevant. The same plot could have been set in any archetypal place with a credible history of violence and torture... South America? Former Yugoslavia? Caucase? Heck, actually, since the prison/torture part is altogether sufficient to hold the whole movie, the very same movie could have been set just about Guatanamo (and viewers would then believe for one hour they were watching a anti-US movie, only to realize at the end the total irrelevance of all that)
At the end of the movie, you get that astonishing plot twist, which makes you realize the vast vacuity and uselessness of all the side stories you have been watching for the past hour. But, OK, what next ? What to do with that extraordinary situation ?
Well, nothing. Movie ends here. Tadaaaa.
And loopholes appear : there's obviously a wrong choice of actors : one of them should really look like twenty years older that what he looks like. The lawyer, since he wrote all three letters, should have understood much earlier the whole thing: it never shows that he knows more than the others participants to the quest. Weird.
Good acting. I loved the actresses. The boy is deliberately annoying, and he does annoy me, so I guess he is a success too.
On the whole, a waste of time, the feeling of having been cheated, using a deceitful setup for a story that could hold in three lines.
I do suggest, instead of watching this movie, reading the Robert Heinlein 1953 short story "All you zombies". On the same kind of twisted plot, that gem makes this movie looks... petty.