Product: Triangle (2009)
Rating: 3.0
Almost. Not quite.
Triangle (Christopher Smith, 2009)The heap of "great concept, so-so execution" movies seems to be growing a lot faster than it was five or ten years ago. I'm not sure if this means I'm more critical of technical details or more open to ludicrous ideas being great, but either way, there you go. And I will leave it to you to decide which of these things is the case when it comes to Triangle, the most recent film from Severance director Christopher Smith (not to be confused with American Movie director Chris Smith, by the way). Unfortunately, I can't leave ti to you in this review, as that would constitute major spoilers; you'll have to see it for yourself. And lest I sound like this review is going to be all gloom and doom, you should see it. With the caveat that it's the same kind of "should" that has teachers assigning you Sir Walter Scott in high school; you'll be better for the experience, but you might not enjoy it.The movie starts off with a bunch of folks going off on a three-hour tour. There's Greg (The Secret Life of Us' Michael Dorman), the scruffy, lovable skipper, and his mate Victor (Liam Hensworth, recently of Knowing, and best-known these days as the boyfriend of Miley Cyrus). Then there's Greg's ex Sally (MacLeod's Daughters' Rachel Carpani), her beau Downey (Noise's Henry Nixon), and Heather (The Heist's Emma Lung), because Sally always, Greg tells us, brings alongs a nubile young thing to set him up with. Except this time he's got someone along he's interested in already, Jess (Turistas' Melissa George), a waitress at a diner Greg frequents who's badly damaged from a former relationship (this is never explicitly stated, but you can gather it from the opening sequence; Jess has a child). All of this is setup, then we wander into a freak thunderstorm that capsizes the boat. After some time floating about, they find themselves a cruise liner, and it swings by to pick them up. That's when everything gets weird. Weirder still, Jess feels like she's been there before...You may actually have figured out the Big Twist (which in this movie is separate from the Big Reveal, which is kinda nice) just for the bare-bones synopsis of the first twenty minutes you got there (and if you read any of the studio's promo materials, they're even less cagey about it). But I won't give it away, because part of the fun of the movie is getting to the first (false) climax and asking yourself what they're going to do for the next sixty-five minutes, then finding out. It's fun stuff, and it's not a bad little stable of actors, though I'm not sure Melissa George is quite good enough yet to carry a movie on her own. I love her as an ensemble player (Turistas is a movie I return to again and again), but in both 30 Days of Night and Triangle, I felt something lacking when she was elevated above the rest of the cast. I'm not sure exactly what, and I'm certain this isn't a permanent condition for her (it could certainly be the material in both cases), but it left me feeling vaguely dissatisfied once again. Most of the rest of the cast here just seems to be kind of playing along, bored (Lung and Nixon are exceptions, and of course their parts are the smallest of the main characters). The direction is competent, if not inspired, and the sets are very well-done, and for much of the film lend it an air of creepiness lacking in many of the other haunted-ship flicks that have come across the bow recently. The big problem is that the intricacy of the plot spirals out of control towards the end, and whether you're satisfied by the film's resolution or not seems, from what I'm reading on the net, to depend on how much time you spend thinking about the last couple of scenes (and/or talking them out with others); I'm still waffling. It's solid enough to hold water, but like other aspects of this movie, it seemed like there could have been more. **