Cheating

Rating: 6/10 (18 February 2007)

This movie is of a genre I guiltily enjoy, hence my generous 6/10. This movie is something of a Usual Suspects wannabe, and serves as a reminder of how brilliant Suspects is! In this case the "surprise" twist (the main one) is unsatisfying because it doesn't really make us analyse what happened in a different light. The boy was brought in to kill, and that's what he did. The "twist" simply changed his motive from fear to revenge. Furthermore there was nothing clever about the twist. The movie did entertain me in a shallow fashion with it's protagonists comings, slaughterings and goings, their shenanigans were amusing, and Kingsley's dialogue was fun, in fact he was the only interesting character. However the culmination was deeply disappointing as mentioned above. The movie cheated too. The splatter of blood on a child's drawing (if I remember correctly) implied that the little brat had bought the farm. Major spoiler - he had not, of course. But that scene was a lie, so the twist was a fraud. The "mugging" scene was also fictional, and showing that fraud visually was also cheating! This is because if you show something visually, you are stating it really did happen. Otherwise you end up with a movie where every scene may or may not have happened, which is, bluntly putting it, an easy cop out at best, cynically cheating the audience at worst. Finally every scene with the prattling Lucy lulu drove me nuts, I was at one point I exasperatedly pleaded to the screen, "stop ruining this movie!" And her fake death plot twist was the most annoying "twist" I have ever scene. For when she was shot, I cheered, but the hag was cruelly resurrected. Bad bad writing. Admittedly, I do find the actress grating too. And that plinkety comedy music that accompianied her ridiculously unrealistic dialogue-laden comedy relief (lord help me) added to the woe. Yet somehow the movie was just entertaining enough to be fun, I took the thing at face value, a drivelly Hollywood movie, even if the outcome was hideous.