Early morning when I wake up, I look like Kiss but without the make-up... // Are you in bad terms wi...
Early morning when I wake up, I look like Kiss but without the make-up... // Are you in bad terms with comms at the end of reviews ??
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'Last Sign', in my mind, is not really a movie, I rather see it as a kind of joke. Nothing more than a bad parody of a thriller, parody we owe to a guy called Douglas Law. It's the first work of the man for cinema. No need to precise he'll have to activate his neuron seriously to hope go on making other movies after that one. For, Last Sign is just a predictable, dull and boring movie, intensely full of cliches. A real waste of time and money.
On the French poster announcing the movie at the time, we could clearly read, in big letters, several references to blockbusters and cinema successes such as The Sixth Sense and stuffs of that kind. The aim was to convince our brains that the movie was another big deal upon Signs (again… sigh), but this time more something like a… how to say… Stir of Echoes of the Last Signs of the Sixth Sense of the Others, perhaps. You see ? Mister Law was just playing again with the famous string "I can see dead people". However, at that point, it's no more a string but a rope made for idiot hands of idiot brains to catch. And heaven forgives me, I caught the rope !
But, however… I could not have thought the story would be so stinky. I bet you something. Just stop the reading of the review for some seconds and go to the commentary part. Then try to fancy a plot just knowing there are three main actors in the movie, a woman and two men, that we are supposed to be frightened and that something is dealing with signs
and ghosts. Just remember to come back and pursue the reading after that please !
So, here we are ? Let's check !
Kathy (played by an ageing Andie McDowell) is brave and beautiful. Beautiful, you'll have to believe, it works like that : when you're discovering a story, you have to try to fit the author's vision of things. Here the thing is Andie McDowell is beautiful. Moreover, she's brave. That point is much more obvious for when you're husband is dead and you have two children and one of them is a teenager, you'll have to be brave to survive. The poor husband (Tim Roth) was a doctor and died in an awful car-crash. But life is great for it soon provides another masculine presence within the surroundings of Kathy, for she's forced to rent her husband's ancient consulting-room to earn some money. And fancy that : the consulting-room is just facing Kathy's own house, and she naturally ends hiring the place to a pure handsome french guy, played by Samuel Le Bihan, brutish but supposedly talented and sexy french actor.
At that point, there's still nothing interesting in the movie. Fortunately, things begin to move when Kathy receives phone calls in the still of the night or feels some presence in the house whereas she's all alone. So she's on the fringe of going crazy, she seems to collect stupid acts, for example stating thinking sex or love about the french neighbour should be a mistake, the signs she received being proofs of that. But on the other side, she doesn't seem to understand the thing everyone has however caught for a long time : the identity of the spirit annoying her. She is insane enough to believe a presence is floating in the same room as her, but she's just not able to think of her recently dead husband : indeed Kathy-Andie should go out a little, for it is always the recently dead person who came back. Everybody knows that. And it's usually because that person has forgotten to tell something very important to the remaining one before dying. So to sum up : the dead husband wants to say something to the remaining wife, but she does not understand at all, moreover she's frightened, and totally desparate as far as the sexy neighbour is concerned.
Oh, human brain is such a fantastic machine ! You just have to go to the main programm and click upon "third degree" and time seems to shorten. With the third degree mode, when the girl looks at her phone with pulging eyes of an amazing size, you mentally laugh realizing she would simply have to pull off the wire rather than just shiver like that in a dark corner of her hall. Even when she's under the shower afterwards, we're tortured with some kind of perverse transe, because we KNOW that it is under the shower that the most important things always happen. For it's the time of the scene of collective voyeurism : the girl thinks she's observed, she gives a look, she can see nobody, for there is nobody but the obsessive movie-watchers. Or perhaps a naughty ghost.
If you think to a usual trick of that kind of movie, be sure you'll find it in Last Sign. Perhaps it will stand one day as a kind of greatest hits of what you can do to frighten people when you have no idea at all to make your movie. Perhaps Last Sign will be collector. And the worse of all that, is that poor old Douggie succeed in spoiling even the unspoilable moments. And the worse of the worse is that what is true concerning the thrilling part of the movie is also true concerning the sentimental part : the love story is boring, we've already seen that hundreds of times, and even the background is dull and annoying.
Envetually, do not think the great actors at play in the movie could save something. They are perhaps great but they over all seem to need money : it seems they made the movie without any conviction, without believing a single moment what they are playing. Tim Roth is like a ghost, just transparent. Transparent face, no emotion, no depth. Andie is old. She used to be young and beautiful so she keeps the status, and is said to be old and beautiful. I just agree for old. Perhaps her cow-like eye, her empty smile and her air of being elsewhere helpt me fixing that feeling in me. Old and useless. And, eventually, Samuel LeBihan is the French actor. Exotic, but not essential at all, almost as transparent as Tim the ghost.
So please, just don't waste your time in front of that movie. It should be nothing but the last sign of your lucidity.
How helpful would this review be to a person making a buying decision? Rating guidelines
Thriller - Original Language: English - Classification: 15 years and over - Starring: Timothy West, Neil Morrissey, Tara Fitzgerald, Annette Crosbie, Pauline Quirke, Rob Brydon, Denise Van Outen, John Thomson, Kevin Whately, David Suchet
Production Year: 2002 - Thriller - Director: Bharat Nalluri, Rob Bailey, Andy Wilson - Original Language: English - Classification: 15 years and over - Starring: Matthew MacFadyen, Keeley Hawes, David Oyelowo, Peter Firth, Jenny Agutter, Lisa Faulkner
Nov 23rd, 2005
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