A Crime (2006)

Please don't spend money on this.

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

A boring mish-mash of crap! We had taped it and it was indicated to be a four star movie so we watched it. How does one get revenge on an unknown someone who has to be nuts to give it more than one star? The French female lead has lips that made you think that if you had to leave her for a while that all you had to do was stick her to the wall with them and she would be there when you returned.I kept hoping that Harvey's boomerang would come back and hit him in the head and put us all out of the misery of this whatever-it-was.We know someone who says he is a "screen writer" but has never yet sold anything after years and years of trying. When we see a piece of stuff like this, we turn to each other and say, "Dan could have written that!"

Yes, Harvey Keitel is in this. Yes, he gets naked.Yes, Emmanuelle Beart is in this. Yes, she gets naked.Yes, this is a European production of an American crime drama. Yes, it sucks.A Crime attempts to weld together a U-S style psychological thriller, complete with a couple of "big" twists that anyone can see coming, with a existentialist examination of love and obsession right out of French cinema. Maybe that's not such a bad idea but this movie is the worst of all possible worlds. It's as boring and pretentious as any art house Euro flick while also being as vacuous and preposterous as any other piece of crap that gets cobbled together in the States. As a general rule, I try to watch a movie straight through no matter how bad it is. It's the best way to capture the full effect and it's only fair to the folks who made it. Every so often, though, I run into a motion picture where I can't stand it. I have to stop the film at some point, get up out of my chair and shake off the despair and ennui. A Crime is one of those movies.Vincent Harris (Norman Reedus) is a man whose wife was murdered 3 years ago and the only lead is the taxi he saw leaving their home, a gash in the side and the driver wearing a red jacket and a big, shiny ring. Now, Vincent lives in a Brooklyn apartment and races his pet greyhound that never wins. Alice Parker (Emmanuelle Beart) is Vincent's neighbor, a frequent drunk who's desperately in love with him. Or at least some desperate approximation of what she thinks love is. Vincent is fixated on finding his wife's killer. We know that because Alice and a police detective (Joe Grifasi) specifically describe Vincent in those terms. For his part, Vincent doesn't do anything to justify that description until the film is almost halfway over and then he doesn't appear to be fixated. He acts like he's utterly off his rocker, but I guess the filmmakers realized they had to do something to demonstrate Vincent's alleged obsession or the 2nd half of the movie would make no sense at all.Convinced that Vincent will never be her's until he locates his wife's murderer, Alice heads out and seduces a cabbie named Roger Culkin (Harvey Keitel). She beds him, gets him to fall off the AA wagon, puts a gash in the side of his cab and has him don a red jacket and a big, shiny ring. Then she pushes Roger and Vincent together and…bingo!So, to sum up, at this point in A Crime, we've got a pathetic wretch who manipulates a crazy guy into killing another guy who has a headband and a boomerang. Oh, yeah. I forgot that Roger Culkin has a headband and a boomerang. It wouldn't normally be a big deal but those two things pretty much define his entire character.It turns out that Alice's scheme works and she and Vincent wind up in each other's arms. Then Roger resurfaces and although I sorely hoped that he was a ghost or Alice's hallucination, he's real and his brush with death turned him into some sort of taxi cab supercriminal who exists outside the law. He demands Alice run away with him or he'll turn Vincent in as an attempted murderer. But then it turns out that Roger was the guy who killed Vincent's wife after all and Alice slays him after Roger suddenly turns into the dumbest man alive. Vincent and Alice reunite, only for Vincent to discover what Alice had done, and they both lived happily ever after. Or at least that's what I got out of the ending.There's a frickin' cornucopia of things wrong with A Crime. It's slow. It has no energy or rhythm. Vincent and Alice are barely two dimensional. It's too long. Both of the twists involving Roger can be seen coming a mile away. It's too quiet. The success of Alice's scheme is so improbable that I at first thought it was evidence that the film's POV had shifted to her delusional perspective. Too much time is spent on Alice and Roger's contrived bar conversations. A headband and a boomerang!What A Crime smells like is some arrogant Euro effort to class up an American genre flick that founders on a poor grasp of genre mechanics and a lack of interest in any of the characters as human beings. It is dreary and dreadful and if you can view the whole thing in a single sitting, then you're a better man than I am, Gunga Din. For all us lesser folk, skip this loser.

SPOILERS!! I feel like I got drunk and wandered into the middle of a very strange conversation between a guy who is obsessed with dog racing, a crazy French woman, and a caveman. I think I can see what they were trying for, but oh my did it fall short. It was disjointed, disorienting, and confusing.You start the movie and some enormous leaps of logic are made about the cabbie being the killer....why the heck did he focus on this cab? How could he have noticed this cabbie's freaking ring, but not a cab number or company? Then you're transported to the future where there is a very strange French woman that sleeps is crazy, drinks a lot, and sleeps around. Who is this crazy lady and why is she obsessed with her neighbor.Then comes Harvey Kietel. Man, I love HK, but the direction, editing, SOMETHING was just off with him. Talk about a caveman. My gosh.I gave this every chance I could, but it was not good. I gave it two stars due to a couple of cool cinematography shots, angles, etc. But that is it. Don't waste your time.

***SPOILERS***SPOILERS***SPOILERS**** I watched this movie because I'm a big Norman Reedus fan. I would have preferred if he'd had more screen time for character development. My review contains SPOILERS! Alice (Emmanuelle Beart), a small woman with lips like a cartoon duck, is supposedly so beautiful she can get any man she wants. Predictably, she wants the one man who doesn't want her: Vincent (Reedus), who finds her annoying. He's also hung up on his wife's murder of 3 years prior, which he believes was committed by a cabbie in a yellow cab with a dented door, and wearing a red shirt and a ring. Now, you'd think they'd be able to find this guy. Granted, there are tons of cabs in NYC, but not all of them are yellow. You think they'd be able to find cabs that were on the road at that time and check for dented doors, and also check dispatch records to see which cabbies were driving. But no, with all the information they have, they can't find the killer.Alice decides that if Vincent can only get over his wife's murder (by killing the killer), he would immediately and automagically fall in love with her, despite the fact that he doesn't really like her. She then dupes aging cabbie Roger (Harvey Keitel) to think that the most beautiful woman in the world could fall instantly in love with an aging cabbie who has a boomerang fetish. She dents his cab door (no explanation how she could duplicate the size, shape & location of a dent she's never seen), buys him a red shirt (as if the cabbie wouldn't have changed his shirt in 3 years) and a ring, which again we don't know how she could duplicate.She steers Roger toward Vincent, who arranges Roger's death but does such a bad job of it (despite being helped by a gang) that Roger lives, seeks out Alice (returns to her like a BOOMERANG, get it?) and after Alice tearfully confesses everything to him, decides he still wants her. After doing a weird dance with a booze glass at a jazz club, he insists that he and Alice leave NYC. The minute he falls asleep in her presence, she murders him. Since the NYC police are portrayed as completely incompetent, we are left with the idea she gets away with it and she, Vincent, and his dog all live happily ever after, because of course the need to avenge his wife really was all that was needed for Vincent to fall madly in love with Alice.I liked the look of this film, and I did keep wondering what would happen next. The acting is decent but Reedus is only given a one-dimensional character to play, and the numerous implausibilities hampered it for me. I generously give it a 7, because it gave me a couple of hours to look (on and off) at Norman Reedus.