Z/Web

What is it with Hollywood producing kid movies with adults with negative IQs? This is actually a fun film, but several of the adults are just absurdly moronic (i.e. security guard shocks himself unconscious with electric cattle prod) and it really means that only kids age five could completely enjoy this. Overall it’s a decent concept for a film: a young girl teams with her friends to rob a bank to steal the $250,000 her dad needs to a critical operation. The bank robbery is overly elaborate to the point of being silly, but still fun. Unfortunately, everything is dumbed down. Why couldn’t this be done intelligently and realistically? It could have been really cool? As it is, it’s on about the level of a cheap sitcom, okay but not great.

Strange film. I wanted to really like it. It’s directed with distinction and seems to have more depth than it does. Sadly, the film’s not that profound. It deals with a family bereft by tragedy: their two older sons were killed in a car accident. The husband and wife have drifted apart after that, with the wife cold and distant. The husband, who’s an author/artist of children books, likes to seduce women by getting them to pose for him. Meanwhile, the wife begins an affair with her husband’s new teenage assistant. There’s lots of conflict, emotional tension, strange humor, and some interesting scenes, but everything adds up to a mystery that’s never explained. At the end of the film we’re finally privileged to find out what happened to the woman and her sons, but that explanation, while dramatic, is not earthshattering. The bottom line is her sons are dead no matter how it happened — why is she still so dead? The couple have a young daughter that needs a mother, but the woman abandons her, for reasons that aren’t explained. Some of this abiguity is good and thought-provoking, but much of it just creates empty characters that we can’t relate to and don’t care about. Overall this is a well-acted, well-done film that falls short of the profundity needed for this kind of a deep drama. The director needs to learn that a dramatic pause does not add drama — it merely announces it and gives us time to appreciate the drama that’s already there. In this case, there wasn’t enough drama in the actual story.