Flight of the Innocent (1993)

Such a frustrating disappointment

Beautiful, moving film.

Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

Oh how i wish i could save people from watching this film. It is sooooo cheesy, soo over the top, i wanted to laugh, as in a serge leone film, but unfortunately the director here was dead serious. arggggh. felt like a series of commercials. ALL it had going for it, and I mean ALL, was some beautiful scenery shots including some great Roman buildings. Other than that, if you are a sophisticated film goer,you will buck at the melodramatic schmaltz (both of the repeated shots of bloody murders, the repetitive slow motion shots of bloody deaths, and the light-filtering-in-the gauzy- child's- bedroom shots with the vaseline- coated lens.) Fortunately I could fast forward through all the stupid predictable dreck.If I save one person from watching this, i will feel so much better.

Italy went through a wave of kidnapping not long ago where wealthy citizens, or their children, were taken away by professional bandits. Most of the people behind this type of crime were from the Calabria area. In fact, it was an industry where some poor people without scruples stood to make a lot of money by extorting rich Italians with the crime they were committing. These evil men would keep the unfortunate victims hidden and would only return them to their families when they received payment. Some times the kidnappers killed their prey when something went wrong.The film concentrates on two enemy families of kidnappers. When Vito's father kills two opposing members of another gang, their family comes to get revenge and kills six members of the young boy's family. Vito runs away to go look for a brother at a cave, where he discovers a boy, who has been kidnapped, lying dead. When he discovered the boy, he also found a knapsack with an address printed in it, which he assumes is the dead boy's.The film follows Vito as he flees from the enemy that wants to kill him in amazing fashion. This peasant boy, who probably hasn't left his backward area, finds uncanny ways to avoid being killed and outsmarts the guys that are pursuing him. Eventually, he ends up at the house of the dead boy, where the distraught mother believes her kidnapped son has returned home, to the horror of her husband, who sees the truth.This Italian film, directed by Carlo Carlei, is a document about that era of that tragic period in the country. Mr. Carlei paces his story well in the way he sets the chase of the boy as he tries to evade his pursuers. Manuel Colao is perfect as the young boy. Francesca Neri and Jacques Perrin are seen as the parents of the kidnapped boy.The film will not disappoint because it shows the sure hand of a director, Carlo Carlei, who takes us for an exciting ride.

Although from a cinematography the production is good, the story and the actors are in doubt. First the story: it is about a kid from a crime family in the deep south that escapes from a deeply agrarian society to the heavily services-oriented north. Well, sorry to tell you, but the deep south as it is mythologized in the Godfather movies, doesn't exist anymore. Everybody has a cellphone now, nobody wants to be a Sheppard anymore, everybody wants to have an office job. The story is highly simplistic and idiomatic, kind of a cute story of a sweet looking kid with bad guys around him. Then the actors: the parents of the kidnapped child are "acting" the part that it is so obvious. When they see the child's school backpack, the knee to it, pick it up, and embrace it. So obvious, that it is classic "B" movie, and so predictable, more for a melodrama aired in soap-opera afternoons. Even how the director directed the shots has some unnatural feel: when the kid emerges from the crypt in the cemetery, he is made to turn his head slightly and then express surprise to discover there is a vehicle. It is as if the kid didn't have peripheral vision. Such scene direction by putting emphasis on frontal screen scape is typical of television direction of simple and uncomplicated easy-to-do productions. To have it here just shows how simplistic that was. But it was the only time it happened, otherwise, the other scenes are more dynamic

(Plot spoilers ahead.) Violence erupts in a shepherd's field in the Italian region of Calabria. Several men are shot and killed. Later the entire family of the men responsible for the slaughter is itself brutally wiped out in a revenge massacre, except for the young Vito, hiding under the mattress of a bed. He spends the rest of the movie evading his family's murderers, who need to get him out of the way.Vito realizes his own family was part of a kidnapping crime involving a young boy (son of wealthy Sienese parents). The two murderous and murdered crime families had clashed over the issue. The kidnapped child has been killed, but the surviving criminals still want to collect the ransom, asserting that the child is alive. Vito runs away, on foot, by train and truck, any way he can, seeks sanctuary with a relative in Rome (and his girlfriend), until he too is killed. He is questioned by the police, sent to a safe haven, apprehended by a gang member, escapes, continues his noble quest to seek the parents of the slain boy, to tell them what happened, to return to them the ransom money he had found, to tell them not to pay a ransom because their son is dead. At heart he is engaged in a quest to seek new loving replacement parents, to become a substitute son to "replace" the son the Sienese couple has lost. He finds the family's home, with information found in the kidnapped child's bookbag. He barges into the house. The lost child's mother (Francesca Neri) finds this young intruder, takes a liking to the lad, going so far as tenderly bathing the boy and outfitting him with her missing son's clothes. The father (Jacques Perrin) refuses to believe his boy is dead, and negotiates with those still seeking the ransom. This final confrontation between father and criminals causes Vito to be nearly killed…but because of him the villains are subsequently snuffed out by the police in a final violent shootout.Vito dreams of a world where all can live in harmony, children are safe, and blood feuds are unknown. Would that were so. This is a beautifully made film with moments of great excitement and tension and sudden bursts of extreme violence and slaughter that look like out-takes from Sam Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch." Nevertheless, there is a tenderness at the core of the film, which is often very lyrical, sometimes excessively so in long-winded dreamy evocations that pop up from time to time…and at the ending. In short, it's a good thriller, with a humane dimension, on a relatively rare topic, the Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta and its record of child-kidnappings.Performances are uniformly convincing with the remarkable Manuel Colao as the sweetly poetic and shrewdly cautious youngster. Jacques Perrin and Francesca Neri as the kidnapped kid's parents are perfect, and Federico Pacifici is frightening as the deranged scarfaced killer. The direction by Carlo Carlei, whose first film this was, is top-notch. I used to show this film to high school students of Italian, despite the R-rating (for violence) and it invariably went over very well with the teen audiences. It is of interest to note that the 2003 Italian film "I'm Not Scared" ("Io non ho paura") by Gabriele Salvatores, has a story with a number of similarities to this one.