Saturday 4 December 2010

The Disappearance of Alice Creed


This film started off well but it ended with five anti-climaxes that wear thin. At the start, you see the various stages in a professional kidnapping and it feels almost like a DIY Kidnapping video. This builds up a lot of tension, as you think that these bad guys mean business. Alice seems scared out of her mind and some bondage enthusiasts will love these scenes.

There is a big twist when it turns out that one of the kidnappers, who had not been speaking around Alice much, was actually her friend (presumably ex-boyfriend, although this is never entirely clear). Danny goes from scarey kidnapper to bumbling idiot. He lets Alice free one time when his more ruthless friend, Vic, has bobbed out. Alice manages to break free, seduce Vic and turn the tables on him, but then she is unable to escape and an attempt to locate the door keys leads to her being almost strangled by Danny, who returns to his ruthless character for a few minutes.

Another twist is when it is revealed that Vic and Danny are in a gay relationship. I'm not sure why this was put in, as it was not a pivotal detail in the plot and they don't seem very emotionally engaged in most scenes of the film.

The ending is too drawn-out. Vic's last action before death is to throw the keys to Alice (perhaps this is the equivalent of repenting on your death bed). Alice escapes, finds Danny dead in a car, and drives away with all the money. At least it's good to see the victim triumph.

I give it 6/10 overall. It was a good idea and the detail of the early scenes was impressive, but there are too many twists in the second half of the film and some of these are just twisting it back to what the story line had been before an earlier twist.