Arlington Road (1999)

It is a performances centric movie

Good concept, poorly executed.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

I agree with much of what patrick3201 wrote.This could have been a very short film. Oliver Lang could just parked a car with the bomb outside the building and left. Or a completely different bombing method, but uncomplicated. Job done. Then moved to the next target. I don't see the point in all the hassle he went through just to make Michael Faraday the scapegoat. He could have drugged him and placed him in the car if that was so important. He certainly couldn't expect that Michael Faraday would drive through the barricades to get in to the garage.I just don't buy the story leading up to the conclusion.

One often believes that good deeds done by a person are rewarded in some form or another. This belief becomes more strong when two people involved in an exchange of good deeds happen to be neighbors. This observation is the basis of 'Arlington Road', a thriller which has some nice moments of a strong beginning part, an average middle section and a weak ending. For a fast paced thriller, director Mark Pellington has extracted superb performances from all actors especially its lead stars Jeff Bridges and Tim Robbins as neighbors who were beginning to become good friends until some sudden unexpected events impacted their friendship. 'Arlington Road' is also the perfect family film which gives viewers ample idea about the vulnerability of an ordinary man who is used as bait by people who claim to be friends. Apart from questioning the validity of friendship in a fast changing uncertain environment, this film also questions the reasons one might have behind trusting/mistrusting neighbors.

The movie opens very mysteriously like a horror, builds up its story like a true crime flick with a hint of political thriller here and there, yet it ends very nicely in a solid thriller fashion. The story weaves in nicely, peeling out layer by layer of information with just enough hints here and there. And the gigantic twist at the end is very satisfying to complete the solid story, although the most seasoned thriller watchers may have been anticipating that. What's quite bad about this movie is that there are more occasions of the usual coincidences that happened, which in my opinion could have ruined the build up by created discontinuance and even plot holes. The acting is very nice overall. I like how Jeff Bridges can deliver playing a dad and a grieving-inside husband at the same time. You'll see that Tim Robbins really gave a great job when you see the ending.

I had seen this movie some years back, and now have seen it again, on BluRay from my public library. I wanted to see it again mainly because it is fun to see where it is filmed, many places I am familiar with. In fact the final chase scene, supposedly in Washington D.C. and ending up in a FBI building is actually the underground parking area under One Shell Plaza in Houston, the same building I worked in for a number of years right before this was filmed. The movie is set in the areas surrounding D.C. but except for a few location shots was filmed in Houston and surrounding neighborhoods.Anyway, to the movie, a pretty interesting terrorist thriller. Jeff Bridges is professor Michael Faraday. Not many years earlier his wife, an FBI agent, had been killed in a botched raid. This heightened his interest in terrorist subjects in general. When he finds a young boy wandering down the middle of the street in his neighborhood, bleeding, he scoops him up and takes him to the hospital. That gets him to become friends with the boy's parents, neighbors he had not yet met.Those neighbors are Tim Robbins as Oliver Lang and his wife is Joan Cusack as Cheryl Lang. They seem nice enough but Michael's paranoia gets him suspicious of blueprints he finds in the Lang home, and he begins his own investigation into who these people really are.It isn't a great movie but a pretty entertaining one, Robbins and Bridges are good in their roles, as well as Cusack.SPOILERS: Michael soon finds that Oliver Lang was not his original name, but a name he took as a young adult after the childhood friend of that name was killed. Michael digs and finds that he had been convicted of crimes as a teenager and now suspected he was planning to blow up an FBI building in a terrorist plot. In the end when it appears that Michael might have thwarted the plot, he in fact became an unwitting part of it. The car he was driving actually had the bomb, and in the parking garage in the basement of the building exploded killing him and many others in the building.