Belfast Meet, Details at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ belfastmeet/ - come along, you know you wan...
Belfast Meet, Details at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ belfastmeet/ - come along, you know you want to.
Member since:22.01.2001
Reviews:172
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Multi-region DVD Players eh?, great inventions aren´t they? I mean you can get all the top titles on DVD months earlier than you would here in Blighty and cheaper too, when I bought my player thats what I originally thought, but since then I´ve had the (and I use the term loosely) pleasure of viewing the Region 1 (American) Release of the Watcher, a movie thats been hyped up so much it has to be said when we strip down to the bare bones its a bit of a let-down.
Settling down with my staple movie-watching diet of one large tub of Haagen Daaz Ice-Cream and a large bottle of Pepsi hoping that we´d have a fair old horror movie, we soon found that the thought of the damage to my teeth (and my wallet when the dentist finds out) this kind of food will do was scarier than the tale we were watching, and all this after a great opening.
We start off seeing a Police stake-out on a building, it soon becomes obvious that the character Keanu Reeves is playing is the man they´re searching for, in fact in a change to your regular horror movie - you know who the murderer is within the first 5 minutes, we get a chase scene as David Allen Griffin (Reeves) runs away from his impending capture, before we cut to Joel Campbell(James Spader) in a psychiatrists office telling of how he´d been chasing a murderer for years and never got anywhere near
catching him, hence he moved to the city we´re in now.
Before long theres been a murder in Campbells apartment block, this originally means nothing till Campbell finds some unopened mail in his apartment that turns out to be pictures of the murder victim, from here-on in its plain to see that Griffin has followed Campbell to his new home-town and has started yet another killing spree, only this time he´s sending Campbell pictures of his intended victims and giving him 1 hour to find them. The reason this movie ever came to be called `The Watcher´ is because Griffin `watches´ his victims first (clever eh?, no I didn´t think so either), getting to know every little thing about them and picking his spot to make his move when he knows his intended victims will be all alone.
This is where the story-telling ends, there are quite a few twists in the tale that if told would completely ruin what little story there is, what we end up with is a cat and mouse game between Griffin and Campbell, seeing how Campbell tries to find Griffins intended victims before Griffin gets to them, and although there are a couple of nice touches to the movie - story-line-wise its a standard fare, its not genuinely a bad story-line so much as one where the writers could have done a lot more with what they had, its a tepid affair by all means and this makes for a slow movie.
However there isn´t just a story-line to be reviewed as the cast try and make it into something a little more than it actually is so cast-me-do time:
Keanu Reeves (David Allen Griffin): this was one of `The Watcher´s´ main selling points - Keanu Reeves plays a bad-guy, and the man tries to pull it off theres no denying that, and with a promising start as he does look truly menacing on screen when we first see him, but the cockiness of the character makes him a little too unbelievable as a genuine threat to society, maybe we´re just used to him being the good-guy (Speed, The Matrix, Bill and Ted, etc) but it just doesn´t work that well.
James Spader (Joel Campbell): another turn around for the books as Spader has often been known to play the bad guy in a movie yet here he is trying to be the saviour in this movie, this time hes playing a neurotic character who needs to see a psychiatrist as often as possible, whilst taking a cocktail of drugs to keep him going, he is genuinely mean and moody on screen and puts in what has to be said a very good performance making his character real and believable, hes taken the character of Campbell and made it his own.
Marisa Tomei (Polly): Playing Campbells psychiatrist Tomei turns in a half-decent performance - essentially shes the `eye-candy´ for the movie, and as such I´m sure some of you seasoned veterans of Movies are already aware what her main part is in the whole story, she floats around screen, trying to constantly look good if nothing else and her performance is average to say the most. She tries but its definitely not her best performance.
Ernie Hudson (Ibby): Campbells partner in trying to find Griffin, hes basically there to provide a couple of clues in the chase, Hudson does provide a good character its just that again we don´t get to see that much of him - when we do, he is a calming influence to Griffins anger - he makes the whole FBI/Police involvement in the movie more believable.
Short cast list isn´t it? well to watch the movie its more of a Reeves and Spader show than a full movie - those two being the main characters, we don´t really get to see that much of the other characters, it makes it hard to be objective and see the movie for what it is as these 2 take up the bulk of the whole production, but that is what the Producers wanted.
This leads me onto the next point of the movie - reading the production notes they state that the location is actually a big part of the character of the movie, what they wanted to get across is how easy it is for anyone to be a serial killer, and they hoped to put this across in the fact that Reeves´ character finds it easy to blend back in with the crowd walking around and the phrase the producers used was `getting lost in the night-time rush´ and this does come across well - the darkness and moodiness of the locations that were chosen truly adds to the effects of the movie and makes for an eerie setting to some of the scenes - interesting fact time: when this movie went into production, they had to film all the scenes in 75 days as they wanted to utilize how dark it gets in Winter and needed to get the scenes filmed before Spring spoilt the night-time aura they needed.
Final part of movie to get a mention is the sound-track, this time there is a little bit of a sound-track - we get music in the background from the stores our characters are walking past and there are times when Griffin plays music to accompany his murders, theres a hip-hop/dance feel to what we´re hearing and again it adds a little to the movie, making the whole scenes a little more atmospheric.
Overall if you watch this movie expecting the hype to be true then sorry, but you´re in for a shock, there are times when it comes close to what the trailers and reviews promised and if you sit back and throw all expectations out of the window theres some fun to be had here. When it all comes down to it theres a great movie here trying to escape from an average movies body.
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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
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
FBI agent Joel Campbell (James Spader) has gone into hiding. Traumatized and beaten down ... more
after years of pursuing psychotic killers in Los Angeles he is trying to carve a new less stressful life for himself in Chicago. But his guilty past follows him....
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![The Watcher [DVD] [2001]](http://picnica.ciao.com/uk/78523042.jpg "The Watcher [DVD] [2001]")
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