Never judge a film by its trailer.
This looked to be a good bet, based on the two minutes of the ad I saw on telly, so I went along, expecting to be entertained.
Now, I have sat through some long films in my time, all 3 Lord of the Rings for a start, but this felt longer than all of them, and it lasted only 94 minutes.
Trouble is, there is very little time to gain any empathy with any of the six people involved; a small snapshot at the beginning, filmed in irritating imitation of a video camera establishes that they know each other, and then it cuts to five years later, when the friends meet up again, plus a couple of significant others and a baby, to celebrate a birthday on a friend’s yacht. All are too beautiful, too thin and too under-characterised to allow any kind of audience-bonding before the inevitable crisis occurs.
I kept expecting something really nasty to happen, but apart from the skinny blonde in the string bikini getting hysterical and reciting the Lord’s Prayer (which made me want to hurl, frankly), the various ways the protagonists meet their respective fates are clichéd, predictable and boring. The use of dramatic music is horribly over-done and generally serves only to make one expect something bad…only to be sorely disappointed.
By the time the sun rises again and the ambiguous ending is played out with about as much emotion as a digestive biscuit, all I could feel was glad that it was over.
The only significant line of dialogue in the whole sorry mess is the one used in the trailer, and the one which sums up the feelings of the people struggling to sit through the film in its entirety: “Where’s the ladder?”
This looked to be a good bet, based on the two minutes of the ad I saw on telly, so I went along, expecting to be entertained.
Now, I have sat through some long films in my time, all 3 Lord of the Rings for a start, but this felt longer than all of them, and it lasted only 94 minutes.
Trouble is, there is very little time to gain any empathy with any of the six people involved; a small snapshot at the beginning, filmed in irritating imitation of a video camera establishes that they know each other, and then it cuts to five years later, when the friends meet up again, plus a couple of significant others and a baby, to celebrate a birthday on a friend’s yacht. All are too beautiful, too thin and too under-characterised to allow any kind of audience-bonding before the inevitable crisis occurs.
I kept expecting something really nasty to happen, but apart from the skinny blonde in the string bikini getting hysterical and reciting the Lord’s Prayer (which made me want to hurl, frankly), the various ways the protagonists meet their respective fates are clichéd, predictable and boring. The use of dramatic music is horribly over-done and generally serves only to make one expect something bad…only to be sorely disappointed.
By the time the sun rises again and the ambiguous ending is played out with about as much emotion as a digestive biscuit, all I could feel was glad that it was over.
The only significant line of dialogue in the whole sorry mess is the one used in the trailer, and the one which sums up the feelings of the people struggling to sit through the film in its entirety: “Where’s the ladder?”