You can take this movie from two different sides.

As somebody who is very much interested in history and geography and has studied both for many years, this movie is obviously full of mistakes and wrong stereotypes. It is almost as inaccurate as the "Spartacus" series. And this is never an original movie. We have all watched movies with very similar story lines about the evil Romans who want to control everything, the poor gladiators who stand up against them and the forbidden love between a rich young woman and a foreign slave. I can understand why many people are rating this film down. If you really want to watch a sophisticated movie about that time, go for the classic "Ben- Hur".

What I think is strange is that all these stereotypes were highly predictable from the trailers only. I am asking myself why people even went to watch this movie if they were going to hate it for the reasons mentioned above. Some people just want to bash a movie and seem to have a very sad life if they waste their time watching movie they dislike so much.

I went to watch the movie for something different. I wanted to watch a colourful movie with impressive sets and costumes and stunning 3D effects of an exploding volcano. I was eager to watch a fast pace flick with a lot of fighting scenes, some tension here and there and maybe a few love scenes with beautiful actresses. And I exactly got that.

In addition to this, the acting was just good enough and included a few interesting characters. I really liked Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje and Jessica Lucas in this film even though they played stereotypical characters and could have had more screening time. If you are going to watch this movie for Carrie-Anne Moss or Kiefer Sutherland, please do not. They have been much better in other movies in the past.

In the end, it all depends on you. If you want to watch an original and profound movie and learn something about the Roman Empire, just forget it. If you want to watch an effect ridden action adventure, you are going to like this. It is not the movie of the year but I surely had a great time watching it. 

"The Truck" is another highly intriguing contemporary movie that easily beats most of today's Western films.

This time, it's a quite twisted thriller with a few elements from multiple other genres. It includes the typically dark but sometimes also slapstick orientated Korean humour that you either like or hate. Personally, it made me chuckle from time to time. The funnier scenes are especially in the beginning of the flick and don't take too much space.  

As the movie goes on it gets more serious and grislier. In the beginning, the film is some sort of a drama. The movie then becomes a tense thriller and even explores the psycho thriller and splatter genre. Apart of the first twenty minutes that introduce the characters, the film is quite fast paced and also features a lot of action scenes. There is no big budget behind this production but the movie lives from its solid actors, the tense atmosphere and quite a few twists in the plot. This film will bring you on the edge of your seat until the final five minutes. 

The conclusion of the movie could have been a little bit more detailed but the way this film ends fits to its rather fast pace. 

Let me tell you a little bit more about the story. It portrays a single father who is working hard but doesn't earn much money. The only thing he owns is an old truck. He doesn't have much time for his daughter who lives with her grandmother and he can't keep all the promises he makes to her. On the other side, he really loves his daughter more than everything else. She is the sunshine in his life that keeps him going on in difficult situations. But as her mother and grandmother before her, the daughter has a problem with her weak heart. When she gets exposed to big physical efforts or stress, she may lose conscience. When the poor daughter gets exploited by some silly girls, she gets so sick that she has to go to the hospital. She needs a costly operation to get a donor's heart implanted. The doctor tells the father that they already found a donor but that a rich family is also interested in buying that heart to save their son even though this young man will never be cured and die anyway. The doctor tells the desperate father that he has to get 60,000 dollars as soon as he can to finance the operation before the rich family officially purchases the heart. 

The father tries to get some money together. He sells a few things, talks to friends and goes to see loan sharks but he still can't make enough money. A fellow worker suggests him to go and play poker. The father initially refuses as he thinks that gambling is stupid and you can only lose. But soon he realizes that there is no other chance for him because time is running out. The father goes out to gamble against a few local gangsters. In the beginning, they let him win quite a lot but when they start to gamble with bigger sums, the poor father gets tricked and loses everything. He realizes that his fellow worker had been playing tricks on him and that he is collaborating with the gangsters to attract potential victims and get their money. The desperate father loses his temper and gets involved in a brawl with his fellow worker and the gangsters. The fellow worker escapes into a room in the cheap hotel and is followed by the father and the gangsters. They are quite shocked when they realize that a massacre happened in this room. A menacing gangster is still at the scene of the crime and has just killed several victims and is about to kill the two witnesses. When he hears the young father's story he changes his mind to exploit his unfavourable situation. He tells him that he will get the gambling money back so that he might have enough to pay for his daughter's operation but the family father has to get rid of the dead bodies in a distant province without getting caught by the police. 

The family father puts the bodies of the dead on the back of his truck and starts his journey. Meanwhile, a serial killer escapes from a police escort. When the family father passes beside a police truck that got off the road, he realizes that somebody has killed everybody inside and that this is where the escape just happened. The scared man wants to go on but soon discovers an injured and surviving police officer. The officer gets on his truck and tells the family father that he is the only surviving police officer of the escort. He thinks that the murderer is on his way to another city where his mother lives and orders the truck driver to go there immediately. The family father realizes that the police officer is acting strangely and when they stop at a gas station, he gets to see a poster that identifies the injured officer as the escaping serial killer.

The family father has no choice but to get back on the truck as he doesn't want to raise suspicion. A true nightmare begins. How can they both escape from the police now as there are checkpoints everywhere? Will the serial killer realize that the truck driver got to know his real identity and kill him? What are the serial killer's real intentions and plans? Can the family father get rid of the dead bodies on his truck? Will he be back at time to get the money and save his daughter?

From that point on, the movie reserves us many surprises that I don't want to spoil you. By now, my review should have intrigued you enough to watch this gripping movie. I'm sure you won't regret it.

Orisonata – Orisonata

March 5, 2014 in Reviews by Sebastian Kluth

"Non-Stop" is a solid action-thriller with the extraordinary lead actor Liam Neeson. I watched this movie because of him and even though he doesn't beat his best performances, Liam Neeson is absolutely convincing as cold-hearted human wreck and sorrow-ridden air Marshall. It's sad that his character isn't more developed in this movie as we never get to know whom he was talking to on the telephone in the beginning for example.

The story itself is nothing new but could have been more convincing. The movie starts in a great way when the alcoholic chain smoking air Marshall gets text messages via a secure network on a flight from New York City to London, England. An unknown criminal announces that every twenty minutes a passenger will die if the air Marshall won't send 150 million dollars to an untraceable Swiss bank account.

After an initial suspense, the story gets a little bit ridiculous when the first victims die. The first murder could have never been planned that way by the terrorists. The second murder isn't well explained either and even the third murder feels random even though it makes more sense than the first two. These are not the only plot holes in here. At that point, the story is running in circles, though. People are dying every twenty minutes, all characters are judging too quickly and the air Marshall loses control all the time. After a promising start, one just waits for something spectacular to happen but there is nothing more to this.

Of course, we will get the so-called twist in the end and know who is behind the hijackings and killings. The solution though feels half- hearted and isn't really credible. It somehow doesn't make much sense to me. For me, this moment was a little letdown and the twist is (almost) more of a deus ex machina thing than anything out-thought.

What else is there to say? Liam Neeson's acting is good and some secondary actors are doing a solid job as well but the characters represent too many stereotypes. It's the same for the story that feels as if one had already watched a similar movie before.

The action scenes, special effects and the soundtrack are well done. The numerous text messages on screen get quite annoying and how could anyone write that fast as it's the case in the movie anyway?

In the end, fans of Liam Neeson should watch this movie without a doubt. Anyone else will get a tension filled action-thriller without any big surprises. It's an entertaining movie to watch but also the kind of film that you will have forgotten in a few months. It's nothing truly impressive but still a good average effort. Instead of showing more or less convincing Hollywood cinema, I'm asking myself why the North American and European cinemas are not showing us more memorable and poignant films from Asia, Europe or South America.

I was hesitating between six and seven points for this movie. The film is not overtly original but it's entertaining and it has Liam Neeson in it. Still, I was expecting more than this and that's why I went for the lower rating. Actually, 6,5 out of ten points would have been the perfect rating for me. 

This movie is a moderate budget television adaption of the critically acclaimed novel "Hatchet" written by the American author of young adult literature Gary James Paulsen. The short novel published in 1987 tells the story of a young teenager who has to survive for several weeks in the Canadian wilderness after a plane crash.

The main challenge of this eight-two minutes long movie from 1990 was the fact that the whole story is carried by the main character alone. Most of the novel and the movie takes place in the wilderness and features no dialogues but some soliloquies. Child actor Jared Rushton did an accurate job even though I disliked the fact that a sixteen-year old teenager played the role of an unexperienced thirteen-year old boy.

Despite the solid acting, this movie sometimes feels like a National Geographic documentary that shows us incredible landscapes such as forests, lakes, mountains and waterfalls and a multitude of animals such as bears, porcupines, raccoons and wolves. This is definitely beautiful to watch but gets quickly boring.

Due to the low budget, some scenes feel a little bit goofy. One can clearly see that the wild animals are trained and tame. The fighting scene between the main character and a bear in a lake even made me unintentionally chuckle.

On the other side, a couple of scenes of this movie are actually filled with tension. Where the book sometimes gets too descriptive, the movie has a faster pace and the solid soundtrack helps up building some atmosphere. The sequence where dream and reality mix as the main character encounters a lone wolf is very well done and my favourite part of the film along with the campfire fighting scene. A few mildly shocking scenes in form of the eating of worms or the appearance of the pilot's ugly cadaver in the plane wreck added some spice as well.

A few elements in the movie are different from the book. Some new ideas such as the covering with mud to protect from mosquitoes work very well. On the other side, the flashback scenes are a little bit redundant. The alibi side story around the divorce of the main character's parents is rather uninteresting in the novel and in the movie as well from my point of view.

In the end, this short movie was quite entertaining and is worth to be watched once if you liked the book and the survival genre in general. Especially younger audiences should like this movie even though nothing beats the classic Enid Blyton movies of my childhood. Adults should rather go for survival movies like "The Grey".