A well made thriller, but tends to bring little else to the table

Rating: 7/10 (27 June 2005)

The Machinist is a movie much in the same vein of The Jacket: well sculpted and put together, but it's short comings are far too glaring. The difference is how everything unfolds within The Machinist, a taut, yet slow-moving film that becomes fairly predictable at the first sighting of Ivan.
The one thing that really makes this film work is Bale, who quite literally gave his all for the film, which in many ways, makes you forget about some of the obvious moments in the script. While the lighting and general eeriness of the film really brings you in, Trevor Reznik's decent into madness doesn't follow too well with the scenery. It's like trying to shoot a film at 60 miles an hour while the script only let's you get up to 35. The ending just couldn't live up to the rest of the movie, which had a great build-up but just seemed to fall flat.