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Trust Weighted
OK
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16Trust Points
John A Massie's Review
Summary - OK 2.5
The start feels rushed and a lot of the middle feels loose and unconnected and whole thign never really gels as a single enjoyable story. This film almost feels like its trying too hard to avoid using noir archtypes leaving most of the supporting cast filling familiar roles but with nothing else filling the void left by the deliberatly avoided cliches, theres no meat, no strength to the characters so instead of an interesting supporting cast the film ends up having vauge, ill defined, uninteresting people occassionaly interacting with Casey Affleck’s good but not great or anything main character. the film has a few moments of brilliance but is overall flabby and kind of dull and uninteresting.
Not bad, but nothing to get excited about either. Pretty much the biggest and most telling fault I found with the film was that the moments of death and violence raised within me a response of “Oh, that happened? Well, thats kinda interesting. I suppose.” Like the film itself, I saw the effect they wanted to have on me but they failed to achieve the impact.
Acting - Barely OK 2.0
Male Stars - Good 3.0
Female Stars - Barely OK 2.0
Female Costars - Pretty Bad 1.5
Male Costars - Barely OK 2.0
Film - Good 3.0
The final scene’s CGI was TERRIBLE, the rest of the film’s visuals and music was pretty good.
Direction - Good 3.0
Dialogue - Good 3.0
Music - Very Good 3.5
Visuals - OK 2.5
Edge - Obscene 4.7
Some very strong and explicit Male on Female violence. the overall dullness of the film lessons the effects of these scenes, but if they were to be taken out of context they would be much more shocking. But for anyone claiming the film is just an excuse to show violence against women, its not. One of the film’s themes was how the way Lou Ford was raised messed up the way he viewed and treated women. No matter how uninteresting I found the film, I never felt it was just woman beating for the sake of woman beating.