Posts Tagged ‘ thriller ’

The Butterfly Effect is the must-see directorial debut from directors Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber, who worked previously together as a screenwriting team for Final Destination 2.  Ashton Kutcher, made famous by his role on That 70s Show, stars in this film as Evan Treborn, a man who periodically blacks out due to a rare neural disorder he shares with his institutionalized father.  Evan and his best friend Kayleigh Miller (Amy Smart from Road Trip and Rat Race), her brother Tommy (William Lee Scott), and Lenny (Eldon Henson), grow up in a hellish childhood environment and are all traumatized by a childhood incident where a woman and her baby are killed very gruesomely.

In Layer Cake, which is based upon a British novel of the same name, we get a rare peak into the British criminal underground through the eyes of a very successful cocaine trafficker who is never named, but is played by Daniel Craig.  He is well-educated, smart, respectful, and not greedy.  Having accumulated enough of a modest fortune for himself to live pleasurably he plans to leave the business while he is still ahead, but that all changes when his supplier Jimmy Price (Kenneth Cranham) assigns him two very difficult tasks before he will be allowed to leave: find the whereabouts of a young woman named Charlie, the daughter of a powerful associate name Eddie Temple (Michael Gambon) and find a buyer for a massive amount of ecstasy pills which have recently been stolen in Amsterdam.

1999′s Lake Placid was an unusual movie from its beginnings.  It’s a star-studded black comedy about a giant crocodile terrorizing a small lake community in Maine featuring a flamboyant, wealthy professor with a passion for crocodiles in Hector Cyr (Oliver Platt), a common-sense, polite and gentlemanly local sheriff named Hank Keough (Brendan Gleeson), Jack Wells (Bill Pullman) a rough-and-tumble member of the Maine Fish and Wildlife Service, and Kelly Scott (Bridget Fonda), a professor of paleontology with a New York City-based natural history museum.

The Kingdom is a 2007 blockbuster that accomplishes something many mainstream Hollywood movies attempt and fail: it creates a realistic thriller based on realistic events and portrays both sides of the conflict in reasonably equal lights. Director Peter Berg tells us the story of a team of FBI agents who push their way into the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in an effort to investigate a terrorist attack in which Americans were killed.

This adaptation of the book does nothing but shave off the important and interesting parts of the novel and then tries to cram what’s left into a more-or-less cookie-cutter Hollywood plot, and ineffectively, at that. Director Ron Howard casts Tom Hanks, Audrey Tautou, Ian McKellen, Jean Reno, Paul Bettany, and Alfred Molina in what can best be described as an interpretation of the plot as conceived by author Dan Brown.  Robert Langdon (Hanks) is a respected symbologist and is called to the Louvre late at night to find a mysterious murder scene.