Wrong Turn at Tahoe (2009)

As Good As It Gets

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

The acting in this movie is really good.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

I took a chance with this film after as it advertised itself as a gangland crime drama and Harvey Keitel was part of the cast. No sure guarantee of a classic but I wasn't expecting one. Only a fairly decent film.Cuba Gooding Jr stars as a "right hand man" to smalltime hoodlum Miguel Ferrer who is caught up in a personal war with Mafia kingpin Harvey Keitel after killing one of his drug dealers. Things get messy when Ferrer's wife is brutally murdered as retaliation which sets a revenge plot for the rest of the film. There's also a side story with Gooding Jr flashing back witnessing his father's murder as a child. It all sounds promising.However this is not the case. All the way through it was a rather slow-paced bore-fest full of stereotypical "gangster dialogue and clichés" witnessed in other far superior films.Gooding Jr is wooden, Keitel is wasted although Ferrer does himself justice with his character.It's not a total bomb, far from it, but rather a great storyline not brought to its potential and that's the frustrating part.Approach with caution.

Thoroughly agree with Wizard 8; a tidy and unpretentious little gangster flick with solid performance from all the players. Miguel Ferrer does indeed hold the screen as a hard man living by a set of questionable principles, but Cuba Gooding is no slouch as the right hand man approaching a personal crossroads in life. The legendary Harvey Keitel just has to turn up on this one. The plot is fairly simple, the dialogue punchy, and it just moves right along. Not for the kids please – too violent - but it certainly deserves an adult look. It doesn't pretend to be Godfather Part 2 - what you see is what you get. Good flick.

With a great cast how could a film go wrong? Oh wait... remember Heat? I have to say Franck Khalfoun makes a valiant effort as a fairly young director, and he shows a great amount of potential to become a master. The majority of the acting and cinematography was also good, but the foundation of a film is the script. When are the studios going to stop wasting money on films with horrendous scripts? Eddie Nickerson's lack of writing experience is obvious in this clichéd piece of tripe. He borrows heavily from the writing styles of Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese with out the originality or guts to make the script his own. Here's a tip Eddie: leave Quentin and Scorsese's writing styles to Quentin and Scorsese!

Call me a product of the ADD age, but it's not very often these days that I'll actually sit through an entire movie without at least fast forwarding through some parts (you know, like the de rigeur musical montage in romantic comedies). And when I saw Cuba Gooding's name in the opening credits, I seriously considered putting an end to the movie and to my misery right there and then (I still have nightmares about his and Christian Slater's disastrous last effort at movie-making). And yet, as the movie developed, I found myself drawn into the plot and the characters. Mind you, this film is not a treatise on either. The plot and characters are rather simple, and we only get brief glimpses into the origins of the relationship between Cuba's character and that of his boss, but it's all we need. The rest is like a good old fashioned shootout at the OK corral. All in all, I'd say this movie was every bit as good as The Departed, minus the star cast and director.