Again, I’m guilty of not having seen the original here which probably makes me a bad film lover, though it seems to be the right way to approach the thing as the director really made it almost exclusively because he felt too few people had seen the non-English-speaking production … which is kinda sad in itself to begin with.

I guess I want to start before I go “off on one” so to speak (it’s not guaranteed but it’s possible … oh it’s always possible lol …) by saying, I get what the director is trying to do and say with this film (and, presumably, the original) – if only because his self-confessed intentions have been so well-documented. Again, I find this kind of sad – like the saying goes, if you could put it into words, well, what’s the point in painting it? And a lot of the more positive reviews of this movie seem to go in one direction against the criticism, amounting to, “You don’t get it. THIS is what it means,” which to me really says it all.

I didn’t personally get the intention in the end. By which I mean – I get it, but it didn’t work for me as apparently was intended. Though none of the horrors are actually shown onscreen, I felt as the end credits rolled that I’d seen them anyway – that I’d got my kicks, as it were, despite the approach. I saw Naomi Watts in her underwear and tied up, I heard her screams, and those screams were so terrifying that I looked away even though I knew there was nothing to see. So I won’t deny its incredible use of cinema … but, honestly, I never really felt like it was any different from what has come before – Texas Chainsaw, Last House, Clockwork Orange, Straw Dogs. Frankly, Cannibal Holocaust did a much better job of making me feel “involved” in the horror; in this whole department, there’s really only one short sequence here that lived up to what I expected.

Haneke is a fine film maker – you can feel a lot of Kubrickian influence here and I’m interested in seeing his other work. Naomi Watts and Tim Roth are fantastic. All the technical stuff is top notch. It takes a long time to get going, though, and even once it does it’s far from gripping; and in the end, personally I feel it fails miserably in its aspirations. I think those who think the naysayers are missing the point on this one need to go back and look at how intelligent a lot of the old nasties really were.

I was really impressed by Rocky Balboa ... and I guess it was a little dumb of me to expect Sylvester Stallone to do the same here as he did there; part because, in a sense, I guess he has done the same as he did there, only, not in the way I expected. Rather than instill the franchise with something more than the basic high concept formulaic nonsense as he did with “Balboa”, he’s really made here the definitive Rambo movie, just as he made the definitive Rocky movie in “Balboa”. I think the best review of this I’ve read recently said something along the lines of, it would probably feel more at home and play better on a crappy VCR, pan-and-scan and tracking problems included lol. He’s been that faithful to the general feel of the series.

Which is a shame – I figured especially with the titling of the installment, he was going for the same thing as Rocky Balboa ... reclaiming the franchise and showing ‘em how it’s done after being disappointed for years with how the sequels to his greatest successes were being treated. The last half hour of violence here goes some way towards making it worth watching … but it’s really mostly a letdown all the way. He had a gift here in that the title hadn’t even yet been used in the series (“First Blood” having been the title of part one) ... boy does he squander it.

Hmm. Like American Gangster and 3:10 to Yuma before it this year, I can’t help feeling disappointed here. From the director of Crash, A History of Violence, the writer of Dirty Pretty Things, and the exuberent praise of Mark Kermode, I’ve gotta say I really expected more from this. A second viewing might prove me wrong, but I haven’t even got round to a second viewing of “History” and I still know that movie was better – most particular in the visuals department. London just looks drab here, and not in any kind of way that it’s pertinent to the plot. Just about everybody involved here has done better work, and even the already infamous steam room scene isn’t that impressive. At 90 minutes I’m bound to watch it again before Oscar time, particularly if it’s nominated for anything … though that would really surprise me.