Some of my favourite films of recent years are Nobody, Extraction, John Wicks and even Polar, so I was looking forward to watching this.
First the good bits:
-Story was OK, nice to mix it in with excluded and socio-economic divided groups in India. Nothing amazing/original here and it had some holes.
-Acting was perfunctory, nothing stand out great and nothing atrocious.
-Violence, on occasion there was some well shot satisfying violence.
Now the bad bits:
-All of the unrelenting shaky cam, absolutely no need for all of it. I almost walked out in the second act because of it and I've never walked out of a cinema. They tried to do longer type shots for the action especially in the final act with less shaky cam, but still not shot well.
-Really, really too many out of focus shots, either the cameraman was really inexperienced or they had too much really bad stylistic advice. Really distracting and really frustrating (just like my overuse of "really")
-Almost constant poor framing of shots. Nothing was easy to watch and fortunately once shot every few minutes was OK to give my eyes a rest. Not sure if they bothered checking the cinematographer's CV before they hired him. Surely they had one, right?
-The action, I love action films especially gritty, realistic, violent ones where the choreography has to be sharp and flow. This wasn't bad by any means but completely forgettable and shot appallingly compared to any of the films mentioned above. Dev Patel was OK, but a couple of times he was waiting for a punch and just out of the rhythm of it.
All in all a disappointing film and a waste of the price of the cinema.
First the good bits:
-Story was OK, nice to mix it in with excluded and socio-economic divided groups in India. Nothing amazing/original here and it had some holes.
-Acting was perfunctory, nothing stand out great and nothing atrocious.
-Violence, on occasion there was some well shot satisfying violence.
Now the bad bits:
-All of the unrelenting shaky cam, absolutely no need for all of it. I almost walked out in the second act because of it and I've never walked out of a cinema. They tried to do longer type shots for the action especially in the final act with less shaky cam, but still not shot well.
-Really, really too many out of focus shots, either the cameraman was really inexperienced or they had too much really bad stylistic advice. Really distracting and really frustrating (just like my overuse of "really")
-Almost constant poor framing of shots. Nothing was easy to watch and fortunately once shot every few minutes was OK to give my eyes a rest. Not sure if they bothered checking the cinematographer's CV before they hired him. Surely they had one, right?
-The action, I love action films especially gritty, realistic, violent ones where the choreography has to be sharp and flow. This wasn't bad by any means but completely forgettable and shot appallingly compared to any of the films mentioned above. Dev Patel was OK, but a couple of times he was waiting for a punch and just out of the rhythm of it.
All in all a disappointing film and a waste of the price of the cinema.