I had heard good things about and was looking forward to it.
But I came away feeling dissapointed. Normally I like movies about conspiracies, and in some ways I did like it. I felt Fiennes did a great job.
I think the two things that kept me from really liking the movie were:
1.) It felt preachy. I felt like I was watching a combination of Runaway Jury, John Q. and Erin Brochavich. And all those movies felt like they were hitting me over the head repeatdly with their message.
I spent the entire movie thinking of the bit in Team America:
Tim Robbins: Let me explain to you how this works: you see, the corporations finance Team America, and then Team America goes out… and the corporations sit there in their… in their corporation buildings, and… and, and see, they’re all corporation-y… and they make money.
Yes, Pharmacertical companies are evil! I get it! Frankly, I think the Daily Show made the point much better with their Faux Pharmacutical commerical.
2.) Racheal Wiess got on my nerves. She reminded me too much of her character in Runaway Jury, which also annoyed me for being preachy.
I felt if they had toned it down a bit it would have been a better movie. Am I alone in thinking this?
I felt pretty much the same way. It was an OK movie, but it seemed like the drug company spent an awful lot of money chacing RF’s character around the world. I kept thinking: wouldn’t it be much cheaper to just do the standard clinical trials in the first place? They were only talking about saving a few mil, which they had to have blown on all the extra cover-up they had to do.
I thought it was a really good movie, and it didn’t feel especially preachy to me. Sure, it had a message, but i never really felt like i was being beaten over the head with it.
And i’m not sure i agree with John Mace’s analysis of the economics. It was about more than a few clinical trials; the consequences of the trials themselves could have had a dramatic impact on the bottom line, because proper trials, in theory at least, make the drugs drawbacks and side-effects known, and could even lead to the drug being pulled altogether. Also, time is money, and doing the proper clinical trials, especially if they had to start from scratch, might have added years to the whole process.
And i disagree about Rachel Weiss’s performance too. I thought she was excellent.
Each to their own, i guess.
Now if you want to talk about preachy, overly-didactic movies that take a great concept and ruin it with awful dialog and implausible plot features, i saw Crash last night…
That’s a tough one. Her character was so irritating that it’s easy to not like her. But then, she probably was supposed to be irritating and so the acting was good.
I was pleasantly surprised by the movie. I enjoy character-driven movies and thrillers, and this was both. The good guys weren’t too good and the bad guys were generally not too bad, just like real life. And Rachel Weiss’s character was a bit strident and unlikeable, again like real life. It also tried to address the question of what might drive a compliant, almost submissive civil servant into a “Bourne Identity” type avenger. I thought the movie answered this admirably.
Gee, I guess I liked the movie more than I thought :), although I can understand if this might not be everyone’s cup of tea. What I consider nuanced others might consider tedious.
BTW, I don’t think comparisons with *Crash *are relavent. That movie was more of an allegory, and isn’t made to be taken literally. I hold thrillers like *TCG *to a different standard, and I think plot holes are a bigger deal.
And I didn’t think *Crash *was preachy at all. It just laid out some stuff for us to think about. It’s a starting point for a conversation, not the end of a convesation.
No, i realise that. I said the same thing to my wife last night when we were discussing The Constant Gardener. She said, “It’s a movie; not everything has to make perfect sense,” and i said that when a movie purports to tell us about real-world issues, it should be credible.
I’m not criticising Crash for plot holes as such, but i still think that even an allegory (i’m not sure that’s exactly the word we’re looking for here) has to have an element of believability to it, especially when its purpose is to make us think about real-life social problems.
But, for me at least, some of the dialog was so painfully didactic and unrealistic that i kept getting bumped out of the movie experience. I wasn’t able to avoid the feeling that i was being lectured to by some third-rate sociologist. The message was worth listening to, but it just made for an awful movie experience, IMO.