When you watch a lot of indie films you will often run across films that were born from clever, unpredictable scripts that excited actors who tire of reading lame story ideas. However, some of these clever ideas actually work better on the page than the screen and I think this movie suffered a little bit because of it. Sometimes convoluted stories really excite people who add greater depth to the tale (Donnie Darko), but most of the time you get a well acted experiment that sits on the bottom shelf of the rental wall. This film is the latter, but it was still too fun to skip.
The story is an ensemble that centers around a supremely obnoxious genius professor (Alan Rickman, who chews all the scenery with an evil grin) who wins the Nobel Prize, but has his celebration cut short by the kidnapping of his disappointing son (Bryan Greenberg). Things naturally get out of hand, but I will say that the conclusion is one you won’t see coming. The cast is filled out with solid actors who were drawn to the nuanced quirky characters and includes Danny DeVito, Mary Steenburgen, Ted Danson, Eliza Dushku, and Bill Pullman. Every scene with Alan Rickman is a delight and you can see why he is the king of villain roles (Robin Hood – Prince of Thieves, Die Hard, Harry Potter films) and Eliza Dushku (TV’s Dollhouse and Buffy) continues her attempts to pad her resume with dramas so she isn’t stuck in her tough girl typecasting.
If I fault the movie any further it would be for the Paul Oakenfold soundtrack, which often felt out of place in the character driven drama. I kept expecting Morpheus to jump across the scene to drop kick Blade to justify his techno beats. This was his first complete score after being a contributor for many films and I hope he chooses films more fitting his style or learns to tone it down in the future.
The Features includes a Commentary from the Director, the two writers, and two of the stars including Eliza Dushku, who magically appears twelve minutes into the commentary and was clearly recorded at a different time. I usually am against commentaries with more than three people because they often devolve into a conversation between the hosts with little consideration for us as the audience, but this commentary was informative and funny although the audio quality is poor. The single featurette is essentially a cast role call where each actor tells how he/she fell in love with their character, and the remaining features are a scant few deleted scenes and trailers.
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