Incendiary (2008)

Very disappointing...

For all the hype it got I was expecting a lot more!

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.

The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

If you like me saw the poster (and the IMDb genre listing for that matter) and thought that this was a drama-thriller, let me tell you that it's not.Although there are some slight moments of suspense this is solely a drama film about grief.They do throw in some other elements to it as well, some that works better than others but the true essence of the story is a woman grief after a great tragedy in her life.It tackles the subject-matter rather delicate for the most part and it does feel rather realistic for the more part.It's rather depressing though, but I suppose that is the point.Michelle Williams impresses by the sole fact she's able to sustain a British London accent throughout the movie and not once ever slip into a American one, which is extremely rare with American actors doing films in foreign English speaking countries but she had it down to perfection from beginning to end.She also pulls a good performance over all as well.So yeah not a feel-good movie that's for sure but it sustained my interested reasonably well, even though I don't know if I'd watch it again.

I'm going to start this review by making an effort in being generous and understanding, pointing out, that a possible reason for the galactic difference between the novel and the motion picture, is that the former was written one year before the actual terrorist attack on London on July the seventh 2005, while the latter was shot four years after, which could explain the impossibility to maintain certain features of the novel, which I am going to further analise in a second. Having specified that I now feel free to unleash the beast. First a plot summary as brief as possible: A working class woman, with an over the top personality, portrayed as a sort of Bridget Jones epigone, has her husband and her four year old son killed in a suicide bombing attack at the "Emirates Stadium". This is the only snippet the movie and the novel share; Afterwards they take two totally different directions. The book depicts a dismal, dark, gloomy, bleak , post apocalyptic setting, from the point of view of the female protagonist, in the form of a letter addressed to Osama Bin Laden. Chris Cleave, a Guardian columnist, literally paints pictures with his words, showing a society in decay, with particular concern about class conflict and government deceptions. Some claim that the only merit of the movie is to show the place where the book protagonist lives; that is only partially true, due to the colourful and imaginative writing of the novel, which is more than sufficient for the reader to form a picture in his head. The book also features modern,highly twisted and thrilling eroticism, which is the reason for this review's title. The novel follows the rules established by the late and great J. G. Ballard in his 1973 milestone in the history of modern literature, "The Atrocity Exhibition". Ballard, who worked for BBC at that time, and must be considered as one of the founders of British contemporary media, highlighted a sick connection, between catastrophes such as atomic explosions or car accidents and the release of sexual energy. Of course in the novel the perspective is turned upside down, the woman reminiscences images of the bombing while finding herself in sex related situations, but the connection is exactly just the very same. The film does not cover any of these aspects: Politics, Society and twisted eroticism are almost completely neglected, and replaced by a sappy soap operistic piece of trash, which makes Michael Bay's "Pearl Harbour" shine as a Stanley Kubrick motion picture. The doom setting of the novel is replaced by the brightiest, most childish, shallow and dull cinematography I have ever seen. The editing, especially towards the second half, is completely random. The soundtrack was probably written by some British equivalent of those self nominated, self righteous Italian "pop classical artists" such as Ludovico Einaudi or Giovanni Allevi. An unhonourable mention, concerning the acting and then we're done. Matthew Macfayden stars as Terrence Butcher, the head of the anti- terrorism task force. His acting can be compared to a first grade child, reading the list of the grocery store, or to a freshly retired ski alpine world champion turned into acting for the first and last time in his life. Fortunately they probably digitally removed the paper from where he was reading his lines in post production. To sum up, if you have already read the novel, stay far away from the movie, otherwise the book is a must read, therefore I highly recommend it.

Incredibly slow. Long periods when they didn't find dialogue so filled it with repetitive monotonous piano music. A plot with a good centre but too many twists or 'devices' to be believable. Because of the tenuous plot, characters are more difficult to relate to or care about. Too many themes / subjects.So I didn't like it much ! I thought the above was a succinct review but now IMDb is making me write 10 lines, which is ironically similar to how I feel about the film actually given all the long slow panoramic shots over music while the actors look sad or longingly or suchlike. So yes this paragraph is just for that end, sorry everyone, but this review is less time than the film, so it's of some value. Ha !

This is an odd but engaging film about the aftermath of a suicide-bombing in London that essentially blows itself up in the end. Just like a normal day shattered by a terrorist explosion, this movie gets you to invest a bit of your heart and mind in it and then breaks completely apart, leaving you stunned and wondering what the hell happened.Michelle Williams plays a young mother who's drifted away from her policeman husband (Nicholas Gleaves). He works in bomb disposal and the demand of his job consumes him, leaving her with just their young son (Sidney Johnson). The boy becomes everything to his mother. Well, not quite everything. What she can't get from her son, she heads out to a pub to get from a journalist named Jasper Black (Ewan McGregor).One day, Jasper and the young mother are having sex in her home while her husband and son are at a soccer match. They fornicate while the match plays on TV, stopping only when the soccer stadium erupts into smoke, screams and booming death. It turns out six Muslim suicide-bombers attacked the stadium and killed over a thousand people, including the young mother's husband and son.Now, here's where the story gets a little weird. Jasper discovers that the authorities are concealing the identity of one of the bombers, but doesn't know the reason why. After setting up that mystery, though, the film totally ignores it for a long time and dwells instead on the young mother dealing with her grief. She actually befriends the son of the hidden bomber (Usman Khokar) and even starts up a relationship with the head of London's anti-terror unit (Matthew Macfayden), who turns out to have had a crush on her for years. Then just as you think the movie has forgotten about the mystery and it won't be important to the story, it re-emerges and sets off a chain of events that lead to a final 15 minutes or so of the film that are so stupid and nonsensical that I couldn't believe what I was watching. Let me put it this way - Incendiary concludes with narration from the young mother, reading from a letter she wrote to Osama Bin Laden about how she's not really angry with him anymore and basically wishes they could hug it out. And that's not the dumbest thing in the last part of this movie.I've seen a lot of bad films with bad endings. I don't think I've ever seen a good film that ends as badly as Incendiary. As the story careened to a finish, I literally said out loud "You've got to be kidding me!" on several different occasions. The awfulness is magnified by how much I liked the rest of the movie. Michelle Williams is quite good as someone equally consumed by grief, guilt and longing. There's also a fairly wise theme running through the story where British resilience in the face of Hitler's missiles in WWI is held up as an example of how to deal with modern terrorism. Yet, all of it turns to crap because of Incendiary's atrocious closing.The best description of this film can be found in an episode of South Park. Eric Cartman spends the first half of the show with a giant, alien satellite dish going into and out of his ass. He describes the sensation as taking an enormous dump and then having that colossal turd shoot back up into your body. That's what Incendiary is like. It feels good and then it feels really, really, really, strangely bad.