Hatchet Job

Rating: 3/10 (20 April 2014)

I finished the audio-book and was blown away by the creativity and impact of the narration of such a beautiful and powerful story. Literally, goose-bumps, tears, the whole package. Then, as I often do, I wanted to see the movie adaptation to see how my visualization of the characters and locations differed. Big mistake!
To do the book justice, the movie needed to be 4 or 5 hours long so I was expecting a lot of abridgment - that's par for the course when making the leap from a long novel into a short(ish) film. Even so, I found that badly done. Whole chapters which defined relationships between characters were compacted into 3 or 4 seconds of screenplay. Worse still, what I was not expecting was the flagrant way in which some of the remaining key elements were rewritten unnecessarily into cliché movie scenes which were both less plausible and less entertaining. This is not book-snobbery. I have found many screenplays of great books to have been done perfectly and result in truly great films. This was just not one of them. Read the book or download the audio-book and get the true impact of this beautiful work.