Z/Web

My feelings are split on this film. It has some great moments and some aspects of the plot are clever and extremely well-crafted. But it’s badly constructed. The problem is the beginning. The premise is simple enough: a guy’s innocent wife is in jail for murder and he decides his only recourse is to break her out. But apparently that was too simple, so the director mucked it up by introducing that plot in a confusing manner. For instance, the film begins with an odd scene of our main character driving frantically in a car with someone unseen who is, we gather, dying. This is short and abrupt, and since we only see the driver, who don’t know who is dying. That may be designed to create suspense, but we need more information for suspense. Instead the scene falls flat, and out of context, we really don’t care who died. Undoubtedly this scene was added so we could start off with some action, but it’s too short and there’s no purpose. (Even when we later catch back up with this scene, it’s not that important of a scene.) Then we jump to three years earlier in a restaurant. The man character, our husband, is there with his wife, and they are with another couple. The two women are arguing. What’s strange here is the wife’s over-the-top reaction to the debate. She snarls at the other woman and accuses her of trying to flirt with her husband right in front of her. Since we’ve just met these people and have no idea who is who, this is a bizarre and uncomfortable scene. We aren’t sure who to root for, and we aren’t sure what the argument is about. We’re given little information and everything feels odd and disjointed. Next we jump to a brief scene at home, the couple putting their son to bed, and then it’s breakfast and suddenly the cops are there arresting the woman in an overly-dramatic fashion (lots of hysteria and the child crying). At this point I thought we’d have a trial or in some way explain about the murder. But no: we jump forward two years to where the husband is waiting for the results of the final appeal, and he is crushed when it is denied. His wife will now be in jail for the rest of her life. Of course the key question the viewer is asking is, “If she’s innocent, how did this happen?” The evidence against is revealed much too slowly throughout the film. I think the writer did this to keep the wife’s guilt or innocence ambiguous, but the problem with that is that her guilt or innocence is really irrelevant. If could have been made relevant, but other than one key scene, it’s not even an issue. The result is that the viewer is left confused and puzzled for far too long. Once we get past all these preliminaries and the husband begins to plot to break his wife out of jail, the film really begins, and from that point on, it’s actually a pretty good film. It’s fairly believable. Our hero is a teacher and not a spy, so he makes mistakes as he works to get all the parts of his plan together. (Okay, the shootout with the drug dealer was a bit absurd, but the rest was pretty good.) The last quarter of the movie when he actually makes the escape attempt is really excellent. The problem is still that kludgy beginning. It leaves a shadow over the rest of the film. I honestly think you’re far better off skipping first 20 minutes of this and starting mid-story: you’ll be far less confused and enjoy the rest of the film much better. Part of the problem is the first part is all exposition and setup, which has a very different pace from the action-heavy rest of the film. Yet ironically, that first part really doesn’t actually tell us anything so it fails as exposition! The director should have just started with the wife in prison: her pre-prison scenes don’t tell us anything relevant about her, and the murder — which we need to know about to sympathize with her “unjustly convicted” plight — isn’t explained until the very end of the film! In the end, this is a simple tale the director has tried to make complicated and ruined it in the process.