Hope Springs review

The senior citizen version of romantic comedy is more poignant and funnier than it ever sounds on paper. It has its flaws, but don’t let that stop you from enjoying this rare occasion.

 

How can a romance movie appeal to mainstream audiences and still attract art house audiences to the cinema in equal numbers? It’s a tricky terrain that studios have been trying to traipse across for the longest time. One side wants a fairy tale washed up in comedy or, as they say, a defy-all-odds tale in which the nerd somehow gets the hottest girl in town. The other demands a more honest portrait of relationships or, so the story goes, a realistic retelling of the joys and pains of love where emotions are laid bare to dry. Here at last is a movie scientifically flavoured to appeal to both tastes, ticking off all those factors dutifully. Hope Springs isn’t perfect by any means, but then few can claim to be as brilliant as it is.

 

Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones play Kay and Arnold, a couple whose 31 years of marriage has been sluiced down to a barren routine of silent meals and basic pleasantries. They don’t sleep in the same room or even touch each other anymore, and they give each other cable TV subscriptions on their anniversary. Arnold is slavishly devoted to nightly broadcasts of golf training videos, often dozing off in the armchair, but an embittered Kay is aware enough of the diminishing romance to book a month’s worth of intensive marriage counselling with famed therapist Dr. Feld (Steve Carell). Can counselling really help the couple rediscover the spark in their marriage?

That’s the question that Hope Springs attempts to answer throughout a large part of its duration. Carell, an excellent method actor who has built a career out of playing batty characters over the past decade, pulls off the thorny task of playing the amenable Dr. Feld with a surprisingly controlled performance, remaining calm and sympathetic even as the couple becomes increasingly exasperated with each other. The husband – grumpy, stubborn and insecure – is, of course, played convincingly by Jones while Streep delivers a study in contrast with much aplomb, furnishing a clearly distraught Kay with glimpses of glamour through every hand gesture and facial expression.

Crucially, these outstanding achievements of the leads help Hope Springs become something more special than a dull monologue on the 101 tips of marriage; it’s a genuinely earnest portrayal of the scariness and loneliness of a life inside a failing marriage. Whether it’s an uneasy Kay running her fingers carefully across Arnold’s body for one of Dr. Feld’s ‘intimacy exercises’, or a blustering Arnold embarrassing Kay in a restaurant, or Dr. Feld conveying an unflinching wisdom in the presence of a flustered Kay, the leads handle their roles with a competence that allows the movie to fully exploit the raw emotions streaming between the characters. For this reason, it’s safer to avoid the movie if your marriage or relationship is on a short fuse.

That said, Hope Springs does attempt to break away from its allegoric visions for light-hearted moments once in a while. Dr. Feld sends Kay on a mission to purchase a self-help sex book from the local bookstore after Kay reveals her stress, resulting in a hilariously awkward stand-off between Kay and the bookstore owner when she asks him to help her find the book. A banana also gets to stand in for the male reproductive organ as Kay practices her moves. It’s all very basic stuff and unlikely to ruffle as many feathers as the more serious portions of the movie do. Which isn’t bad, but Hope Springs could certainly have done without the services of the comedy, especially if the aim of the movie is to maintain a more consistent and immersive tone.

With mainstream audiences suspiciously less enthusiastic about the experiences of a pair of senior citizens in a relationship than they are about the fiery sexual adventures of a pair of prepubescent teenagers, Hope Springs is like a jolt from the sky. With all three of its leads coming in at 50 years of age and above, asking for the movie’s success with mainstream audiences is hardly easy. Yet Hope Springs deserves notice not only because it’s actually one of the rare movies tailored for the young and the old, mainstream audiences and art house audiences, but also because its existence is already mystifying. The movie isn’t perfect, but I’ll take what I can get.

RATING 3.5/5

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Interview with Lee Stringer, CG Supervisor of Iron Sky

Human Invasion from Outer Space!

PHOTO: CALVIN WONG

 

It’s August 25, the opening weekend of sci-fi comedy Iron Sky – and we find Englishman Lee Stringer in the Preview Lounge of Orchard Cineleisure, of which the two most noteworthy features are (appropriately) a towering stand-up poster for the movie and (less appropriately) a troublesome clump of wires dangling between a laptop and a wall-mounted LCD screen. The computer graphics supervisor of this year’s surprise €7.5 million (S$11.7 million) hit is keen to show off a making-of featurette but the spluttering screen has other ideas. “Give it some time,” he wryly notes.

 

Created with a Finland-based visual effects team of just over 20, the production of Iron Sky did not exactly share this luxury of time. Stringer, 44, had hopped aboard the project in the middle of last year, working on most of the scenes in the opening and closing sections of the movie. He waxes lyrical about the swastika-shaped space fortress seen in the opening shot – discovered as a US astronaut peers over the dark side of the moon. “We had this strange and wacky idea about putting this obnoxiously huge structure on the moon and it kind of sums up a lot of what we were trying to do with the movie,” he says.

It’s a sort of playfulness that both Stringer and the movie needed. Acknowledging that it was the uncanny combination of luck and misfortune that tied him up with director Timo Vuorensola for the project, Stringer explains that he was supposed to return to Singapore to do a job (he had worked with Lucasfilm Animation Singapore on television series Star Wars: The Clone Wars) last year. “It fell through at the last moment. Literally the next day, I saw a posting online and I leaped. One project had fallen through and another happened to come along,” he says. “I sent them an e-mail and within a week, I was on a plane to Finland.”

At the same time, this playfulness has pushed Iron Sky into its own unique territory. How else would you explain the presence of motorbike-riding German soldiers on the moon or the ability of the people in the aforementioned space fortress to survive without a plausible supply of food? “I think anybody who goes to see Iron Sky expecting a serious, powerful experience is completely missing the point. You just got to go in with your brain mostly turned off and with a big bag of popcorn – and just go along with the ride,” Stringer says.

Not surprisingly, the plot deals with a bunch of German soldiers and civilians who have escaped the destruction of their homeland during the last moments of World War II by fleeing to the dark side of the moon. In the proceeding 70 years of complete secrecy, the Germans have conjured a massive army of space Zeppelins and flying saucers in addition to a mind-blowingly huge flying fortress that can blow off chunks of the moon with ease. The Germans declare war on Earth after a landing on the moon by US astronauts is misinterpreted as a spying mission. What ensue are hilarious acts of misunderstandings between the space Germans and humans living on the Earth and an all-out battle to destroy the flying fortress.

You have worked on many space-themed shows including Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Battlestar Galatica, Terra Nova and now, Iron Sky. Are you fascinated by space?

Yes, of course. I grew up at the end of the space race in the 60s. I was born just before man first landed on the moon but it was still a new thing when I was growing up. There were people going into space and of course, science fiction on TV, film and books. So when I was a kid in the 70s, there was a fascination with space and science fiction because it seemed that everything was moving forward very quickly. When Star Wars came out in 1977, everything changed because any kid who saw that film knew that a whole spectrum of visual effects was now possible. Star Wars had changed people’s lives because it had given them ideas on what they can achieve with visual effects.

What was the inspiration behind the designs of the spaceships in Iron Sky?

We looked at what was going on in the world and in Germany at the end of World War II. I think one of the reasons why people are still fascinated by World War II even though it was 70 years ago is that before World War II, people were still flying rickety old biplanes but within 10 years by the end of World War II, people were flying fighter jets. Technology went through a massive change, so when you look at the stuff that was going on at the end of World War II, it was rocket science compared to what was going on just 10 years ago.

It was a fascinating period but it was also when urban legends and conspiracy theories about German flying saucers developed. What if the Germans took a whole bunch of people in these and flew off to the moon? We went from there and just went crazy with the idea. The design art was really about taking that era of technology and isolating it on the moon and having it develop over 70 years with no influences from the rest of the world.

Iron Sky had just over 20 visual effects artists working on it and a small €7.5 million budget. What were the challenges faced?

We had incredibly limited resources. We did not have enough computers for the rendering, we had taped cables on the ceilings, the servers were overheating all the time and the air-conditioning wasn’t working. It was in this sort of situation that we became more creative. What mattered was that we had a bunch of people who were very enthusiastic and skilled. Everyone believed in the vision they got from the director Timo and people like me who came on-board to help them. We were working crazy hours but it wasn’t like anyone thought the project wasn’t going to work. I think the adversity and limitation actually created more inventive solutions.

Do you think Iron Sky could have benefitted from more resources?

With more money and time, I think we could have done more with the space Zeppelins. We never got to see the control room. I would like to see more of the launching phase where the flying saucers are getting out of the Zeppelins and there are guys actually getting into these flying saucers. And more shots of artillery and guns. It would be ridiculousness on top of ridiculousness.

PHOTO: CALVIN WONG

Which is your favourite part of Iron Sky?

I think the Zeppelins have to be it. Those Zeppelins are huge! During the World War I era, the US even had experimental aircraft carriers that were not Zeppelins, but airships that biplanes could launch out of. So Iron Sky was just taking what was done almost 100 years ago and making it 50 times bigger and better. And of course, I really like how the Germans tow the asteroids and use them as weapons, throwing them onto the Earth.

So to sum up, the essence of Iron Sky is …

being able to poke fun at ourselves. It’s about taking a semi-serious subject of what’s going on in US politics, what’s going on in space and what’s happened in the past with the Nazi regime and then just kind of mashing it all together. It’s about taking a very irrelevant look at the subject, being open with it, not taking it seriously and having fun with it.

What are the types of film you would like to work on in the future?

I would really like to work on stuff that’s realistic. The most rewarding visual effects are the types where the audience doesn’t even know that you have done anything. When you see a space Zeppelin or a Transformers robot, you know it’s not real but there’re so many visual effects that are being done these days on films that you don’t even know have visual effects. I think that’s the best kind of visual effect an artist can do. Of course, I would love to work on more sci-fi films with spaceships but I just like to do stuff that’s more realistic.

* This interview is based on the 2012 movie Iron Sky.

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Step Up Revolution review

Step Up Revolution moves beyond being just an ok dance movie to a loud and crazy concert charged with the most incredible choreography.

Calling a Step Up movie good or bad always seems like missing the point these days. The franchise’s contribution to the dance genre is so prolific and so varied in ways no other movies could ever hope to match that when a Step Up movie is bad, it’s an indulgent wreck, and when a Step Up movie is good, it’s still an indulgent wreck. It’s a sign that a Step Up movie requires a certain set of expectations going in. Yet Step Up Revolution is such a scorching culmination of quality that has been escalating in greatness over the three previous Step Up movies that when I say everyone will be able to appreciate even the stains as part of the package, I really mean it.

Sean (Ryan Guzman) is the leader of The MOB, a dance group that stages elaborate street performances and films them with the goal of winning a YouTube competition where YouTube pays the first video that reaches 10 million hits. The group is languishing and seems to lack a certain inspiration until Sean meets Emily (Kathryn McCormick), an aspiring professional dancer and daughter of real estate tycoon William (Peter Gallagher). Sean and Emily hit it off immediately but when the latter’s father hatches a plan to tear down the local neighbourhood to make way for a resort, their relationship and The MOB’s way of life are threatened. Sean must now work with Emily to turn their performance dance into protest dance to prevent the redevelopment from happening.

This is a lot of set-up for a movie that’s first and foremost about dancing but as you might expect, (spoiler) the power of dancing saves everyone and everything at the end of the day. Step Up Revolution knows that it’s a candy-coloured land where every place is a stage for a concert, where every problem is simply some sort of misunderstanding and where very bad guy can be defeated with a dance and it embraces this cartoonish realism with about as much pride as you had when you received your first paycheck. The problem isn’t with any of these being uninteresting because they’re interesting, but with the whole protest part of the movie.

To be sure, the dancing portions for the protest half of the movie aren’t very different from the dancing portions for the competition half. If the purpose of a protest is to make a statement about a very important issue, then why does The MOB not make any during protest dancing? It’s a silly oversight that robs the protest performances of any significance. At the one time the group is willing to step over the line and throw smoke grenades into the crowd, the police releases the perpetuators without incident the very next day. Or that one time when the group storms right into a foundation stone-laying event for the resort and proceeds with all kinds of acrobatic stunts, the mayor can only be so impressed with the performance that he decides to dance along with them instead of calling for the police.

Yet for all the grumbles about the movie’s cavalier attitude towards something that deserves more importance and sensitivity, Step Up Revolution remains one of most engaging films I have ever watched. I’ll admit upfront that I have mixed feelings about dancing but Step Up Revolution moves beyond being just an ok dance movie to a loud and crazy concert that’s charged with truly world class dancers, the most imaginative choreography, bravura stunts and the best use of environmental objects yet in any and all dance movies (look out for the hypnotising art museum performance and one of the last few scenes where people are dancing while rappelling down a slope!). Step Up Revolution is by far the best and most memorable Step Up movie and rightfully so.

RATING 4/5

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The Watch review

The unlikely blend of alien invasion and humour works like a charm.

 

At some point during the brainstorming process of The Watch, someone realised that seeing a bunch of helpless, terrified people shuddering at the thought of an impending alien invasion just won’t cut it anymore and threw down the idea of making a hilarious end of the world movie. There’s rarely a better epitome of this concept than The Watch. The unlikely blend of an inevitable extraterrestrial conquest and humour doesn’t always work, but when it works, it does so in the most wonderful ways. The Watch is loud, boisterous fun and that’s all that really matters.

 

Ben Stiller plays Evan, the quintessential nice guy who organises various community activities for his neighborhood. When the night security guard at the local hyperstore is murdered, he forms what he calls the Neighborhood Watch, a resident-run surveillance committee that looks out for suspicious activity in the estate. He is joined by the obliviously talkative Bob (Vince Vaughn), the low self-esteemed Franklin (Jonah Hill) and the recently divorced Jamarcus (Richard Ayoade). While investigating the death of the security guard, the group inadvertently uncovers an alien artifact and a plan for an alien invasion. With everyone yet to believe them, the fate of the world rests in their hands.

This is easily one of those movies where the humour works because careful effort was put into crafting the characters. The cold seriousness of self-confessed group leader Evan, the vim and vigour of the unworried Bob, the awkwardness of the fumbling Franklin and the eerily consistent mannerisms of the prim and proper Jamarcus are so comically mismatched that you know the movie can – and will burst into a boom of hilarity at any moment. These personalities come together in about the same way a paper and rock are forced together with flimsy duct tape: there’s the initial friction but after buried differences, countless jokes and hastily exchanged vows of bromance, they just sort of hold together for a common noble purpose. It’s a kind of resulting chemistry that is genuinely fun to watch, easy to appreciate and hard not to respect.

Not surprisingly, The Watch is more fun and easier to appreciate if you are willing to tolerate its near obsessive focus on sexual and scatological humour. Director Akiva Schaffer shoots the timeless brand of comedy off in marginally new directions, resulting in some of the funniest scenes in the later parts of the movie but his reckless use of the humour also means that a few earlier portions of the film can be problematic. An early vignette of Bob throwing masturbation jokes at Evan for his erectile dysfunction while drinking beer and discussing family issues never really ties into the alien invasion story and appears to exist solely as a cheap, disposable gag that breaks the momentum of the movie more than it adds humour.

Even without this humour, The Watch is a perfectly competent piece of action flick that puts more than a few alien movies before it to shame. Any impression that a comedy might throw in a half-hearted alien element for half-baked laughs is immediately extinguished midway through the movie. The aliens here don’t have oversized heads or big useless eyes, only an appetite for human skin, heart and intestines. And our ragtag alien fighting force goes in guns blazing, complete with slow-mo effects and a dead serious attitude towards exterminating aliens. The Watch is about as close as you can get to an Alien movie in a comedy – and to me, that’s a really good bonus. 

RATING 4/5

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The Cold Light of Day review

Spies are smart and spy movies deserve to be clever - but this it not.

It’s hard to really pin down what The Cold Light of Day is supposed to achieve. It reads like a concept reel for emerging leading man Henry Cavill who will proceed to star as Superman in next year’s Man of Steel but it makes so many concessions to the sensibilities of a spy movie that it’s never going to a real jumping point for Cavill. Director Mabrouk El Mechri is almost entirely to blame here, making the most unremarkable decisions that force us to reexamine the intrinsic cleverness of spy fiction. The result is a watery, meandering spy movie that manages even at its best moments to be completely ordinary.

Will Shaw (Henry Cavill) is barely a day into his vacation in Spain when financial problems at home in San Francisco threaten to shorten the trip. After a dispute with his father (Bruce Willis) on the family’s rented boat, Will decides to swim ashore for a break. He returns to find his family gone and a call for help at the local police station ends in more trouble. Discovering that he can recover his kidnapped family by giving up a certain briefcase, Will must beat the clock to unravel the underlying mystery but not before he encounters corrupted CIA agent (Sigourney Weaver) and his lost sister (Verónica Echegui).

On one hand, it’s easy to be enthusiastic about engrossing yourself in the story but on the other, The Cold Light of Day gives very few reasons why you should. Better spy movies have thrived on providing viewers with at least some clue on what motivates each character to retrieve an important object, kill a person or escape from capture so the audience can make sense of what transpires onscreen. The Cold Light of Day, quite questionably, never reveals or alludes to the life-or-death contents of the briefcase, meaning the biggest difficulty is in believing the necessity of all the carnage. It’s perfectly reasonable that Will is willing to fire his first shot and participate in a mad car chase only because he wants to save his family. But it’s hardly convincing to have pockets of mercenaries and agents chasing a briefcase that might as well be empty.

Such is the silliness of The Cold Light of Day that it often struggles to establish what exactly any of its characters intend to accomplish. If Weaver’s character is indeed the CIA agent she claims to be, then she must be the dumbest agent to ever be enlisted. With the briefcase already tucked away in her car seat, she turns a mission-accomplished situation into a senseless civilian killing spree as she trades car paint with Will’s vehicle down the busy streets of Madrid. Spy movies usually ask the audience to forgive some disbelief in order to enjoy them but The Cold Light of Day is by far the most demanding. The slightest bit of investigation into the weak plot will crumble the movie faster than a fragile egg tart.

Fortunately, there remains a vestige of believability in Will. As an innocent civilian unwittingly hooked into a web of dangerous games between mercenaries and agents, Cavill brings a sort of genuine clumsiness to his role, allowing the audience to easily buy his character. For this reason, there won’t be any explosive set-piece or many scenes featuring hand-to-hand combat. There’re a few tricks to prevent the action scenes from becoming too stale and while some of the stunts are decent efforts, others don’t always work. Handcuffed between the tragic decision to set most of the action scenes in the night and the already blurry shots of fast-moving action taken by handheld cameras, you would be hard pressed to find any shot of action that isn’t obscured in any way.

It’s a shame because The Cold Light of Day has a talented cast which can actually do justice to the action. However, none of them bothers to offer a performance that’s required to make other scenes work. Cavill comes across poorly as a man who’s truly shocked that his family’s been kidnapped, responding to a call from the kidnappers with an uncanny calmness while Weaver maintains a surprisingly stoical composure throughout. Willis’s character is quickly written out of the story before he could show his acting chops. In a year filled with other spy movies like Total Recall, The Bourne Legacy and the upcoming Bond film, The Cold Light of Day looks like a distant relative.

 

RATING 2/5

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My Ghost Partner review

Fundamentally flawed on all fronts, this is one mistake-laden showcase destined for the filmmaking school.

I like and support local movies. The works of film industry doyens Jack Neo, Eric Khoo and Kelvin Tong never cease to surprise me with their sharp, controlled takes on issues close to our hearts and charming little tales of love that appeal to the ordinary person. Yet any one of these treasures is often the result of an experience that has stretched for years, a meticulously perfected craft that comes at the price of countless mistakes. It’s with this measured attitude that we must approach My Ghost Partner. Either you are very tolerant of local movies helmed by neophyte directors or you stay away: This film is clearly not going to impress.

Yi Fei and Zhang Shi are two recalcitrant cheaters at the gambling table. Sly but not nearly smart enough, Zhang Shi is drowned after their ruse is exposed. He returns as a spirit to help Yi Fei continue their exploits at the table but they soon encounter three mysterious women who want to recruit them for a gambling competition. Faced with the threat of multiple gangs who want Yi Fei dead and the prospect of facing an old rival who has previously beaten them to their tricks, Yi Fei needs the help of his ghost partner Zhang Shi more than ever.

Former Mediacorp actor-turned-director Huang Yiliang, making his second movie after 2009’s direct-to-DVD Autumn in March, has few ideas what makes a movie tick and his misguided efforts to mask this shortfall often straddle the line between hilarity and awkwardness. He means well to broach a theme that’s easily relatable to Singaporeans yet completely misses the mark in treading anything remotely meaningful to the topic. Instead he proposes an insipid plot that quickly disintegrates under his clueless direction. If you’re lucky, you will get to see a few actors who actually try to put on some emotions in a few scenes. I won’t blame them because like me, they’re just trying their best to get through the movie
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One of the reasons why it’s so hard to get this movie to work is because it has too many characters. I’m not saying that it’s wrong to feature many characters in a movie but the director must have the wherewithal to make sense out of each character and ensure that each character adds at least some value to the plot. The dozen characters here keep the script busy but most of them aren’t even given anything to do. I’m positively sure that two of the women who try to recruit the gamblers into the competition are only present to decorate the screen with their faces and bodies. The movie throws in so many random characters at so many random moments that you suspect it’s happy to be a ridiculous mess.

At the most desperate moments where nothing seems to work, the film aims for light-hearted humour though these scenes often descend into outright embarrassments. Little of the humour works and even those that work are shockingly childish, too emblematic of the most obscure jokes that I once thought forgotten and never to be uncovered again. It only gets worse when the humour doesn’t work: The jokes make absolutely no sense in the context of the scenes. Take, for instance, a man starts to dance and asks a lady whether he dances well when he is asked to buy a packet of tissue. I could only bury my head in my hands.

If you are looking for a local movie that’s going to headline the year, My Ghost Partner isn’t it. If you are looking for a local movie that can offer decent entertainment, this movie still isn’t it. Marked by one of the most clueless directions I have witnessed so far, atrocious performances by amateurish actors who seem plucked from the streets, a bloated character count that sinks the movie into a mess and the most lifeless humour in a local movie yet, My Ghost Partner is fundamentally flawed on all fronts. Unless you are really supportive of local movies, don’t apply.

RATING 0.5/5

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The Silent War review

Only the last half hour is worth watching.

War, in any number of forms, is a frantic activity. War movies, in juxtaposition, are inherently an entertainment business, made by people who measure with near perfect precision the amount of drama and tension that best represents the specific war being discussed. Unfortunately, The Silent War is a miscalculation of the worst sort, mildly interesting in the least parts and wholly numb in the most parts. It takes too long to arrive at any kind of tension and buries its exhausting journey there in an uncomfortable direction and bald sentimentality. I don’t hate The Silent War, but it’s often more trouble than it’s worth.

The movie takes place in 1950s China where revolutionists run rampant. The government responds with the 701 agency, a secret department that spies on conspirators through telegraphs, intercepts their messages and intervenes before they hit. After the enemy cripples the transmissions, secret service agent Zhang Xue-Ning (Zhou Xun) is forced to recruit blind piano tuner He Bing (Tony Leung). He Bing eventually retrieves the transmissions with his heightened sense of hearing but not before he falls into a romantic gridlock with Xue-Ning and colleague Shen Jing (Mavis Fan). With the revolutionists quickly closing in on the government, the agency must stop them at all costs.

Married to the direction of Infernal Affairs veterans Alan Mak and Felix Chong, The Silent War explodes into a cunning game of deceit between the good and the bad during the last half hour, culminating in a gripping finale that sees our heroes barely save the day. It’s a finely performed conclusion that manages to feel like the worst type of indulgence, one that is only justified because the rest of the film is so terrible. Alan and Felix are uncharacteristically conservative here, almost too timid to explore the massive scale of the war and merely satisfied to lock the majority of the movie within the dark hallways of the agency’s building.

The result is a largely one-sided and stiff movie that doesn’t quite earn the narrative trust it’s supposed to have. Tony Leung tries to save the film by applying the most ridiculous dose of concentration in turning radio knobs and conveying a face perpetually taut with distress as he leans in on encrypted messages from the revolutionists while his colleagues caress morse code-printed paper incessantly. It’s all done so that you can pretend that there’re field agents on the frontlines receiving this intelligence and doing all the exciting stuff like chasing and shooting bad guys. Of course, this never materialises and you’re trapped with seeing Tony Leung wearing sunglasses and turning radio knobs for almost 1.5 hours.

At this point, I feel that it’s both fairly accurate and patently unfair to label Tony Leung’s character boring. While the film restricts him to a largely pretentious role, he has a thankless task of quickly switching to a jocular, if somewhat abrasive demeanour that lends reasonable credibility to the romantic portions of the film. This still doesn’t excuse the poorly handled romantic threads that seemingly tear you out of the experience at random intervals, bearable at best and jarring at worst. Fortunately, the love story arcs survive the questionable introduction to work effectively into the denouement.

The biggest problem with The Silent War is that it requires you to invest your interest in a hefty 1.5 hours before rewarding you the big prize in the last half hour. This would be fine if the first 1.5 hours didn’t struggle while attempting to come up with anything remotely interesting. By the time it gets to the really good stuff in the last half hour, the movie’s nearly over and it tries to establish elements that it never spent enough time considering. The Silent War is a movie that could be great, should be great, but isn’t great.

RATING 2.5/5 

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