Slick

Rating: 1/10 (27 September 2013)

Imagine if one day Michael Bay, famous for the high action epic movie, decided to remake the Ingmar Bergman trilogy. It would be full of cuts and grand scenes and instead of muted verbal clashes there would be fist fights. Of course the camera would be so restless as to give a sense of vertigo and the scene transitions would be rapid.
Clearly a mismatch of talent and purpose,
It's the same thing here with a shallow meaningless idiotic version that only shows how little the writing team and the director understood the material. The defense would be that it works for the current generation. And that may be true if weren't such a meretricious irrelevant argument. It is a travesty to update something out of recognition, as perhaps a Bay version of any Ingmar Bergman film would be.
In a way it has to be slick; that is to be a massive sleight of hand, in order to conceal any genuine working or interpretation with the material. This is shock and awe but once the deceit is recognized it's clear that it is really just junk - expensive enough to erase reason for a minute or two, but junk all the same.
A real director would have made something of the very simple material; it is a very slight piece of prose after all, but that requires maturity and expertise to interpret, and in its place, are the grandiose visions of a music video director from 1984.