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.

The Social Network

A film about Facebook. It surprised me by how good it was. I didn't know any of this stuff about Facebook except for one detail at the start, when Mark Zuckerberg creates a website that compares college girls on the basis of looks.

The main triumph of this is Jesse Eisenberg's ability to play a bad geek. I've seen him play nice geeks before, but that is a cliched role. The Mark Zuckerberg who coded Facebook is portrayed as ruthless, lonesome, ambitious and extremely intelligent. He makes Facebook into a rapid success by making all the right moves, including a partnership with Sean Parker. There is a lot of humour directed at Harvard and its mythical societies. One scene involves some young Harvard scholars answering questions about Harvard's secrets in the freezing cold.

You get an insight into how powerful computer programmers/scientists are in this IT-focussed economy and into the status-obsessed social life of top universities. It's good to learn something from a film. It's succeeded when you feel as if you're in the environment that's being depicted. The Social Network wins on this front.

I'll give this yet another 8/10. I know that I've given a lot of 8s, but that's just the way it is. It gets marked down because I feel that parts of it were too harsh on Zuckerberg. (Also Sean Parker is portrayed as having paedophilic tendencies. I've no idea if this is true. When I searched Google, I could only find scruffy websites and videos promoting this.) Eduardo is portrayed as a nice guy whose good nature was exploited by Zuckerberg. He was involved in the film's making, which makes me suspicious that they biased it towards him. The Winklevoss brothers and their friend Divya are stereotyped as privileged and being used to getting their own way, but are also gentlemen and are likeable characters overall. The film ends with Zuckerberg's hoping that his ex-girlfriend will accept his offer of Facebook friendship, which suggests that he is unhappy with life. The film focusses on Zuckerberg a bit too much. To have got a 9 or a 10, the other characters needed to be developed more.

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

The first thing to say is that the original Wall Street is a 9/10. I knock a mark off only because Daryl Hannah was so poor in it. It's funny that Michael Douglas won an Academy Award for Wall Street and Daryl Hannah won a Razzie.

This sequel gets 7/10: it's good but not as good as the original. There is a decent plotline with a lot going on. You see a human side of Gordon Gecko at times, but he's still a manipulative man. There are references to the economic crisis and the bailing-out of the banks. The film begins in a similar way to the origin - by demonstrating how brutal and bitchy the world of stockbroking can be. I was amused by the brief appearances by Bud Fox and the estate agent from the original, and the use of the original theme at the end. However, it's a very different film overall and I'm glad of that. Jake Moore is more established in his career than Bud Fox was, and there's no "good guy" equivalent of the trade-unionist father. It's clever how the informal conversatons between Jake and Gordon are actually trades - favours for favours - as made explicit by Gordon about half-way through.

I say that it's not as good as the original because it doesn't have the catchy one-liners and does not have the same satisfying climax. Oddly enough, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps has a happy ending in which everyone gets what they want. I've read on Metacritic that several critics consider the plot too complicated. I thought it was less complicated than the original. When I saw Wall Street first, I didn't understand how Bud Fox had managed to pull one over on Gordon Gecko. I didn't even know what "insider trading" meant before I'd seen it, although it's easy enough to work out. There are one or two threads in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps that might be cut to save time: the thread with Jake's reckless mother was probably put in so that we understand Jake's background, but I think there could've been better and briefer ways of doing this.

I'm glad they made it as I always wanted to know what happened to Bud Fox and Gordon Gecko at their trials. Now I know!