Beanbioca
As Good As It Gets
Aubrey Hackett
While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.
Sameer Callahan
It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.
MovieSoup
The only reason this film was enjoyable was because Morgan Freeman is in it and James Patterson wrote the book the script is based on. This film has a lot of flaws which I will discuss but first I must just focus on the few good things to get them out of the way. Morgan Freeman is great in this film. He is very believable as Alex Cross and does a great job of playing a criminal profiler. The reason he plays it so well is due to his retrospective, calm but analytical voice that he uses in all of his films to great effect. His voice gives the impression of great wisdom and endless patience which is what a good detective must have.Freeman's facial expressions, too, are spot on for the scenes he is in and give a gravitas to his performance that only a great actor can give. There are a few little things like he is slightly too old for the character and he has a few lines that fall flat but on the whole I enjoyed his performance.The plot of the movie is good as well and does follow very close to the excellent book it is based on. I have been a fan of the Alex Cross series for a while and this movie does capture the Patterson style of suspense and thrillingness that we expect from anything relating to this series (thrillingness is not a word but screw you it is my review).The Problem with this film is every other actor involved is weak. This film has some very wooden performances and terrible actors who emote nothing and add nothing to the scenes they are in. Dylan Baker is terrible in this film. His character has no emotion what so ever and is just so bland on screen that I find every scene he is in to be BLEH. The problem is that Baker is only good for playing small roles like in Spiderman 3 where he is in it for 30 seconds. When you put him in longer scenes you can tell how much of a poor actor he is. I think it is best to put him in a short cameo or TV show but not a full length film. He just can't act realistically. Monica Potter as Flannigan is just terrible and does nothing for the characters persona at all. The sad thing is that in the book she was a much more interesting character that I really liked and wanted to see her done right on film. Every emotion she does is unconvincing and really makes me feel a bit embarrassed for her. She only has one emotion and that is "dumbfounded curiosity" which gets a bit draining after seeing it 50,000,000 times. I was hoping for something a bit more real from her character and Potter just failed to deliver.Child actors in this are a very mixed bag. On one side you have a young Anton Yelchin playing an okay role as a school boy who is semi important to the plot. On the other hand you have Mika Boorem playing an unconvincing captured kid that is just boring to watch and unconvincing. However this did not ruin the film for me as I do not expect much from child actors as they can all be rubbish in film unless directed diligently. The technical side of things is disappointing. Obviously the music is just stock music that they bought of a company and it completely shows. Its not BAD music it is just very cookie cutter and does some scenes a disservice by being too stilted and not framing a scene in the right light. The colour palet of the film is grey and dull with no imagination and the camera work is so still and undynamic in dynamic scenes that it takes me out of the film a bit.It is a shame but I suppose when you have a small budget of……WAIT $60,000,000!!!!?? WTF??? For $60,000,000 they could have made this movie so much better than it was. They could have spent much more on camera work, lighting, decent actors ETC. Where the $60,000,000 was spent I do not know but it is a shame that probably most of it went into Freemans pay.A GREAT film like Reservoir Dogs was made for $1,200,000 and that was shot better, looked better and had a better supporting cast than this movie. It just goes to show that with a great director the budget of a film can be small but still be enjoyable to watch and brilliant on every other level as well. This film is a decent film with a great plot and storytelling but what lets it down is the supporting cast, the useless music and the drab, colourless cinematography. Unfortunately no matter how much I love Morgan Freeman or the books of James Patterson it will not make me love this movie. I did enjoy this film but the flaws are reflected in the score I have given.
Leftbanker
¡¡Spoilers Ahead!! As bad as I think this movie is, and I think it's horrible, there is no denying that Morgan Freeman flies above it all. He almost single-handedly saves this thing, but not quite.Wow, the opening scene was so incredibly freaking awful that there is no way this thing could redeem itself. Why didn't she just tell the guy to pull over and she would blow his brains out? No pun intended. Instead the car flies off a precipice of gargantuan dimensions. Kind of reminded me of the over-kill in the scene from The Naked Gun where the guy falls and then is run over by a steam roller and then a full marching band. That time it was funny; this time it was really stupid.But wait, it gets even worse in the next scene. Mr. Soneji works as a teacher for two years to pull off his crime? Makes about zero sense. What if the kid transfers to a new school or gets kicked out for turning tricks? Happens all the time in rich kid academies. He fakes a Brit accent for two years? The female agent kicks in what looks to be a really solid door. Have you ever tried that? Almost impossible. The agents run out on to a busy street and just point their weapons randomly? He's a madman with a yacht…and a huge flat. How did he swing for a fabulous place and a $100,000 boat? On a teacher's salary?Absolutely everything about this was just too stupid to consider.
alindsay-al
There are many top quality thrillers over the years but I'm afraid to say this film Is not one of them. The premise of the film sees a retired detective drawn back into his work when a congressman's daughter is kidnapped. Morgan freeman is easily the best part of this film which isn't really a surprise. He was great in the lead role and he really delivered in this private detective role that suited him very well. The villain was pretty good in this film even though you don't really know too much about him or about his motivations. However, I didn't really like the partner that freeman gets. It's just she didn't really have anything special about her character for the majority of the film. The story is very generic with similarities to allot of other films but it has a bit of suspense to it. That is until the 3/4 mark where there are a few twists that really spoil the overall plot of the film. The script doesn't provide the suspense or drama that you want, it also moves really quickly so you sometimes miss key dialogue. The style had some decent action scenes and a bit of good suspense. But once again there isn't anything that stands out and makes this film feel truly unique. Overall, this is a below average film that you can avoid.
videorama-759-859391
We have a new crime fighting character in the second of the Jay Patterson books transferred to film- Alex Cross, and it comes off better second time around. This is a more more exciting or livelier film, opening with a thrilling start, which shows Alex Cross's reasons for retiring. He's called back in on a special case, involving the kidnapping of a congressman's little daughter (a real smart cookie) at a collegiate school by a nutter (a fantastic Michael Wincott who has a brilliant facade one might say at the start) who really just wants notoriety than money, but there's a bigger picture here. Yeah, I did have issues with the unsatisfying motive of Wincott's, but there's other qualities in this film that make up for it, so all can be forgiven. Assisting Freeman is a young female agent (Monica Potter-No, it's not Julia Roberts) bed sitting the daughter at school, who fails in his task in protecting her, and feels much obliged to help. The twist in this film is a killer, one of the best, I've ever witnessed, the film's title baring a classic connotation to this aspect. There's much more activity in this film, than the prior, and it's more action paced. This is definitely for fans of Freeman's or as a bonus, for fans of Kiss The Girls.
