Here I go mentioning the IMDb again – part of me is a little surprised by the high score this one is getting. Part of me wonders if people have been grading trailers sometimes. I was completely won over by the couple of trailers and chat show clips I saw of this movie. It looked like pure, butch, intense, bloody, ballsy, unrelenting cinema. I was dying to see it and get sucked into Edward Zwick’s hellish vision of wartorn Africa.

“This is what a million people looks like. The second largest refugee camp in Africa. You might catch a minute of this on CNN – somewhere between sports and weather.”

In the end, this movie reminded me a lot of two of past couple of year’s Oscar nominees – Hotel Rwanda (that line above very similar to a line in that movie) and The Constant Gardener – thrown together with a dash of Amistad (mainly due to the
intense ferocity of Djimon Hounsou’s performance). The movie does eventually hit its stride for a long final slog of violence and drama, and the ending is fantastic, but it takes a long, long time to get there, and the general air of menace Edward Zwick puts into every scene isn’t quite enough to hold my attention.

Leonardo DiCaprio’s performance isn’t all that much to shout about, they’ve kind of cherry-picked his best accent and shouty moments for the trailers and chat-show clips, and the moment I see anything even remotely better he’ll be out of my Oscar predictions for this year like a shot. It’s Djimon Hounsou here who deserves the award recognition, and more than the supporting nod I’m sure he’ll get.

I seem to be big on mentioning the scores in my reviews recently, lol, I apologise, but I’m gonna do it again – I absolutely loved James Newton Howard’s work here, one thing at least that lived up to the promise of the trailers. Reminded me of Mark Mancina’s stuff for Tarzan (lol, that probably sounds bad to some people, but regulars will know how highly I regard that movie); but it’s way more far-ranging than jungle percussion (though there’s plenty of that) ... there’s so many styles and instrumental arrangements used throughout the movie and they flow together wonderfully. I don’t think I’ve been so close to buying a soundtrack album again in years.

One really bad point I have to mention – awful casting of Michael Sheen at the end. After The Queen, him showing up in London in a suit offering 2 million for the titular stone, and it not being made that clear that he’s not playing Tony Blair again, kind of complicates the political message of the movie, lol … or maybe not, lol … but I don’t wanna believe this casting was deliberately for this reason, I really don’t. It might be brilliant to some, but I find it cheap. And believe me, I hate Blair as much as anyone … but if it’s deliberate, I don’t know, it’s just, ugh, cheap and cheesy compared to the rest of the movie, which is actually not bad.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 7th, 2007 at 2:25 pm in 3 hearts, Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.