Watching this after International Velvet, which brought back memories of National Velvet, I couldn’t help but notice the things this movie is missing. That’s not to say it doesn’t have enough plus points of its own though. Beyond Dakota Fanning, which I realise is just a personal thing for me – I happen to love her – I think there’s plenty to enjoy. You really need to look in the nooks and crannies of the movie. Kurt Russell is pretty amazingly cast as the disillusioned pop and there’s some fabulous facial expressions to behold from him, my favourite is when Soñodor is announced as the 14th horse at the selection place, you suddenly realise just how hopeless he was before this whole opportunity came along. Then there’s Luis Guzman and Freddy Rodriguez, who for me just get better every time I watch; again, a huge array of comical expressions to make you giggle, like when they are informed that they now work for little Dakota.

Then there’s the handling of the finale. I struggled to put this into words last review and finally gave up but I think I worked it out this viewing. What John Gatins has done is apply Alfred Hitchcock’s wise advice on suspense and surprise to a completely different genre and for a far more positive emotional outcome.

[Eek. Okay, I’m gonna come clean ‘cos I don’t have the time I’d like to have to work on these reviews – I found the Hitch quote I wanted but it was gonna take me ages to work it in here, so what follows is ripped from the TCM website and puts it better than I could … I hope someone else understands what I’m saying here lol:]

”[The bus bomb scene in Sabotage ... ] blurs the line between the director’s typical use of suspense versus shock. In an often repeated illustration, Hitchcock laid out the difference between the two methods. Shocking an audience was easy; you could show a group of people at a table playing cards and suddenly have an explosion, killing everyone. Much more effective is to show the same group playing cards but also show a time bomb placed under the table, knowing that it might explode any second. This approach is decidedly more suspenseful by engaging the audiences’ fear for the potential victims. Yet, in Sabotage, Hitchcock stepped over that line into shock when [Spoiler Alert] he had the bomb explode, killing the young boy along with other bus passengers and an adorable dog (a complete taboo in England where canines are the favored pet). Audiences and critics alike felt Hitchcock went too far this time and even the director agreed in retrospect when he was interviewed years later by French director Francois Truffaut: ‘I made a serious mistake in having the little boy carry the bomb…[He] was involved in a situation that got him too much sympathy from the audience, so that when the bomb exploded and he was killed, the public was resentful.’” Sabotage @ TCM

There is a huge amount of time in this movie dedicated to the “dreamer” theme – we’re led almost without exception to assume Sonia’s gonna lose, and we’re set up to accept that; afterall, it brought Cale close to her father, it brought him closer to his father, it got Manolin riding again, and most of all, it was a dream that spit in the face of lousy Palmer (David Morse, playing the villain to a T). Even if she lost, it was “the best thing that ever happened to this family,” Cale’s mom says. In the final race, Gatins slows the film down, and lets the camera dwell on the faces of all these people, forcing us again to remember why it’s okay if she loses …. and then, he lets her win anyway. It’s icing on the cake, the relieved laugh after a good horror movie scare, the bomb not going off. You can’t ask for anything more uplifting.

November 6th 2005:

There’s little to say about this except it’s exactly what I was expecting from the trailers and basic set-up. It’s as much a shameless crowd-pleaser as Cinderella Man was earlier in the year with the added bonus of Dakota Fanning brightening every frame she’s in – despite the fact she seems to be eating for 90% of her screen time, lol. I don’t know if she deserves an Oscar nomination for the part as some are suggesting … much as I’d love to see that happen, I think her chances, though equally slim, are greater for her supporting role in War of the Worlds and she was better in I Am Sam and Man on Fire anyway. Elisabeth Shue is well cast as her mom, and the father/son pairing of Kris Kristofferson and Kurt Russell is perfect too. John Debney’s score is usual soaring stuff you get in this kind of movie, but, like everything else, it works perfectly for me.

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