The Mrs. and I watched this on cable last night, and were quite taken by it. We stayed up late trying to decipher a few things, though. We came up with several tentative hypotheses, but I’ll omit them at this point, until I see if anyone here is interested.
Today I went online to see if I could find answers to some of those questions. My usual sources (IMDB, cinemablend) failed me, though. And my google-fu seems weak on this topic.
I’d love to find someone here who could supply answers, either in the form of a website with a good discussion of the movie, or directly.
A few starting questions:
Who killed the drug dealer in the opening scene?
Did Abby know about the money? And if so, why was she surprised about the drugs?
What prevented Abby from leaving on her own as she’d initially planned?
I’m not sure she knew about the money, but she knew about the drugs. Her surprise was that Carlos still had the drugs/dolls. Evidently, he had promised her that he would get rid of them. My guess is that Carlos had been doing it a long time before they met. Then when she discovered them, she freaked. He promised her to get rid of them with no intention of doing so.
What about the crooked detective’s claim that Abby had killed the dealer? Was there something in the movie that pointed to Carlos? A wound on his hand, perhaps, that would have correlated with the blood on the knife hilt?
But her statement to the old russian man that she had a lot of money implied she knew about/had access to the money. My theory is that perhaps she killed the dealer and took the money (and gave it to Carlos to help keep it safe), and was later upset to discover he’d brought the drugs along too.
Perhaps she returned to get money for her own escape, & found Carlos and the money gone?
Did Abby and Carlos leave the train with Jessie out of actual concern for her well-being, or were they afraid of staying on that particular train?
I thought he was just speculating. Or making it sound like Abby was involved to scare Jesse.
He implied that Carlos made Abby kill the drug dealer. So, if she was involved I’m sure Carlos was with her.
I think you’re right, because it was the morning after she found out Carlos still had the drugs. Her discussion with Jesse about the house, showed that she was thinking about getting out. Then Carlos let her down.
I think Carlos had already planned to unload the drugs on Jesse.
Ah, but why? Where was the pursuit? Or did he just want to make her the mule, in case there was pursuit? If so, he’d be fairly quickly linked to the drugs anyway, just from Jessie telling that she’d seen the drugs with him originally.
Jess said there was cops in the lobby. He could have been worried about that, like she said to Kingsley. OR he put them on her and then planned to let someone at her next stop steal her bag. What kinda bugs me now is how he was okay with having his picture taken. Now that I think about it, if the cops grabbed her not only could she describe him, she had pictures of him. With the drugs in her suitcase she was bound to put everything together at some point.
(I just watched this movie two days ago. Frankly, I wasn’t that impressed, it seemed rather un-climatic to me.)
Ben Kingsley strongly implied that it was actually Abby who was the brains of the pair. And he was potentially in a position to know. This was strengthened at the end by the American cops’(?) report on his rap sheet and saying this was a new enterprise for Carlos. I do seem to remember a wound on Carlos hand when he was carressing Jess’ face just before she killed him. So:
Carlos killed him at Abby’s direction.
How would she know to get the money belt from Carlos’ body if she didn’t know about it? I think she was pissed (not surprised) at Carlos for his showing Jess the dolls.
I thought (later) that she wasn’t leaving for good, just doing something else. Maybe she called the main boss to find out what was going on or to find out how much trouble Carlos had gotten her in. Or to place a bid on the house on the lake. Or something else she didn’t want Carlos to know about.
I think Jess was right when she told Kingsley she thought Carlos left the dolls with her because he was worried about the cops searching the hotel (leaving some of the story out, of course). Or maybe he was hiding it from Abby, thinking he could convince Jess to leave Abby and …uuh (Woody) behind.
When Kingsley and his goon were cutting up Abby and kept telling Jess more of the whole story he mentioned once or twice Kingsley said “Find Carlos, Find the money.” I assume if Abby didn’t know what was going on before, she did at that point. Also, the next time Jess and Abby talk is at the hospital. So we have to assume Carlos was the bad guy and Jess…ahhh fuckit I’m confusing myself again.
Abby found out about the money belt from Jesse. That’s the “thing” Jesse needed to tell Abby when she visited her in the hospital room. Jesse figured it was on Carlos’ body after the interrogation.
That’s what I was referring to. Why else would she need to tell Abby where to find his body, if not so Abby could retrieve the money? And I don’t think Jessie "knew " for certain that the money would be there.
I misred then, I thought you meant Jess told Abby about the money. AFAICT the only thing Jess knows about the money is what she heard from Kingsley, that might be the only reason Abby knows anything about it either.
Thanks for joining, folks! Good points are raised…
And why the hell was Abby allowed to wander back into Siberia on her own to get Carlos’ money? I’d have expected her to be escorted out of the country at very least, or followed by the drug lords AND the russian authorities wherever she went after she left the hospital.
My WAG is that her name was ‘cleared’ with the real police and Kingsley had moved on to new things. Perhaps he went looking for Carlos on his own, or maybe he believed Jess when she said she killed him. Though I suspect he’d want to find the body. Maybe after the military showed up he had to go official/straight in respect to this case and as long as Abby wasn’t talking and Jess was on her way back home it wasn’t worth the effort to try and find Carlos anymore.