Liberty Stands Still (2002)

Lack of good storyline.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

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.

Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.

Good lord is this an awful movie. The characters and say nothing that any human being would do or say. It's amazing that a lady who is head of a major gun manufacturing company is someone no one misses when she is held in the park. She is trapped chained to a hot dog stand....where of course she never has to pee...and which has conveniently placed Coke products for product placement...and the only people she speaks to are the sniper and the next the next important character needed to move the plot forward. No one calls her about missing a facial appointment or anything like that.Of course there is a bomb in the cart. Yet...with hundreds of people walking by all the time not one damn one of them ever notices that she is chained to a hot dog cart! And...with a sniper trained on her...which means there is only one single angle to shoot from but no one can figure that out...and a cop shot dead in the street for at least 12 minutes before any rescue can arrive....so nice of the dreck to inform us...NO ONE IS TAKING CHARGE OF THE AREA TO SECURE THE AREA! Not only was any legal context of the Second Amendment ever researched before writing this crap...law enforcement 101 was also skipped.This is an amazing exercise in convenience. Nobody's cell phone dies at the wrong time and the calls are not interrupted. The master villain knows everything about everyone and knows exactly when they will show up. Everything is so "pat" it is just silly.

Enjoyable film showing that Wesley Snipes can, indeed, act when given a good script.Losing a daughter to a punk with a gun, he decides to hold the wife of a gun dealer as hostage. Linda Fiorentino gives a credible performance as the wife who knows she is going to die.Oliver Platt is the husband that we only see a couple of times. He is really not interested in putting himself in harm's way, even for his wife.At the same time, the wife's lover is hooked to a bomb, and we wonder if he will make it.Not for action fans, but for those who like suspense and reflection.

"Liberty Stands Still" was the original phone-booth-style movie, actually coming out over a year before the much more popular film, "Phone Booth," did. "Liberty" premiered at the Palm Springs International Film Festival on January 18, 2002 and was released very soon thereafter. "Phone Booth," on the other hand, premiered at the Toronto Film Festival on September 10, 2002; got it's first US showing at the South By Southwest Film Fest on March 11, 2003; and and wasn't officially released to the US public until April 4th, 2003--well over a year after "Liberty Stands Still" played in theaters.Who copied who? I don't know. All I know is that the idea for this type of 'phone booth' thriller movie first appeared to the public with "Liberty Stands Still" in early January, 2002 (maybe even a little before). Who knows when or with whom the idea originated? Maybe Joel Schumacher was sitting on the "Phone Booth" story for a decade before he started trying to get it made. But, as far as I can see, his film is likely to have copied "Liberty Stands Still," not the other way around.If anyone knows otherwise or has evidence one way or the other, please post who first had the idea and your evidence for why you believe so. This is just a likely assumption. I don't know for sure.

the suspense generated by this movie lies solely in viewers contemplation as to when they will turn it off... when i think about the number of people associated with the development of this project, and the fact that not one of them stood up and demanded in no uncertain terms a rewrite, it makes my head and stomach hurt... without a doubt, this movie has value... in terms of revealing everything that can go wrong... this is not meant as a joke... from the story to the editing, to ninety five percent of the acting... placing an actor in slow motion does not make them appear better than they are... was this stylistic?... i can only imagine that someone thought, strike that, many people thought they were making a movie that meant something... unfortunately, the effort trivializes and even comes across as parody... the central dramatic question posed... how will liberty get herself out of this one? doesn't need to be answered... because the film makers had no clue... and so her sniper simply let's her go?... for a film that was intended to make people angry about unscrupulous arms dealings, second amendment proliferated and protected violence, etc... all it does is make one angry about the time they lost from their lives watching this... ugh...