If you like huge great spoilers, then you are definitely the target audience for this review (not to mention the trailer posted above -do try to resist clicking play). If on the other hand you are one of those oddballs like me who wandered into ‘From Dusk ‘Til Dawn’ on first release and were completely taken by surprise when Salma did the lizard-lady thing, then it’s probably best if you just ignore this and head off to check out Russel Crowe’s latest first hand.
Right, now that the ‘Warning -Spoilerz’ is out of the way, let’s get down to business. STS wandered into a preview screening of The Next Three Days early on a Saturday morning, with a frankly banging hangover. All we really wanted to do was sit in a warm dark room, sip our Omniscience-size pepsi and allow pretty shapes to float around the screen in front of us.
For the first half of the movie, we were well served…
Ah, the old ‘girl’s deformed father’s son with bizarre genetic anomaly did it’ one eh? We’ve herd it a million times before…
Well, ok, no we haven’t, and based on sheer plot weirdyness alone the latest installment in Stig Larssen’s Millenium trilogy to hit British screens scores major points.
There’s all the usual second-guessing and red herrings we’ve come to expect from the author, along with more post-cyberpunk cool from bizarrely hot lead Noomi Rapace (maybe it’s the blonde wig she sports for half the film. That or the rampant lesbian sex on her kitchen floor -the jury’s still out here at STS towers).
Storywise we’re on familiar if unmappable territory, Lisbeth Salander is back in Stockholm after her Carribean sojourn, and Michael Nyqvist’s super-journo Blomqvist hot on her tail, convinced she isn’t responsible for the murder of Millenium magazine’s latest recruit.
Of course she isn’t.
We know it, and so we get to sit back and revel as she stomps around town, beating up massive bikers, hanging sex traffikers and chain smoking her way through a sexy and engaging mystery that nevertheless sticks fairly closely to plausability, to the extent that it’s more fantastical moments are jarringly comical. This should be a complaint, but in fact the moments of levity bring some welcome respite from what otherwise would be an unremittingly bleak viewing experience, it’s frank and unforgiving view of the sex for sale industry remakably blatant to viewers more used to Hollywood’s dancing around the bleaker side of life.
On the downside, there’s the lack of detail that the plot requires in order for all it’s double bluffs to be crammed into two and a half hours.
Readers of Larssen’s books have already been actively complaining that much of the carefully crafted psychological aspects that so characterise the author’s work are absent, reducing the film to an efficient pot-boiler.
While this is true, this is still a diverting adult thriller, although very much made as a ‘middle trilogy’ film, it’s ending slightly unfullfilling after you’ve invested so much time in it.
Some readers may also claim that without reading the book you’ll find the plot hard to follow, but despite a scandinavian setting unfamiliar to most mainstream cinema goers, there’s nothing here that’s unduly confusing or restrictive for the casual viewer.
While it isn’t as satsfying as it’s predessesor, there’s enough intrigue, violent action, retribution (and naked lesbians) here to thoroughly engross for it’s (admittedly slightly over-long) running time, and it leaves you hungry for more in the upcoming -and, if you know where to look, readily downloadable -final chapter, The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest.
Grim but engrossing adult entertainment that’s recommended.
Even though we kindly offered you ungrateful swine free tickets to see this, we thought we should review the bugger anyway, even though it’s another one that’s been doing the rounds for the best part of a year –but hey, it’s quite good…if you like films that replace the cameraman with a lizard and most of the script with acid flashbacks….
Richard Kelly’s fondness for melon-twisting puzzles knows no bounds it seems, as he sets up a preposterously accented Cameron Diaz and hunky hubby James Marsden with the classic do or die moral conundrum: Push a button and recieve one million dollars – the catch? Take it and someone, somewhere, must die…
Gerard Butler and Jamie Foxx team up for some credibility ruining violent nonsense.
While we try to give balanced reviews here at STS, fuck me this is nasty. While a bit of the old ultra-violence is to be expected in a revenge thriller, it needs to be handled carefully if you want to avoid your anti-hero becoming the villain. Here, Butler’s general blandness makes him difficult to root for, meaning he’s on thin ice from the get go, and his subsequent actions end up confusing who exactly your supposed to back.
