Part 5 – The Solid Craft
Series Navigation
Part 1: The Masterpieces |
Part 2: The Near Perfect |
Part 3: The Excellent |
Part 4: The Very Good |
Part 5: The Solid Craft |
Part 6: The Dependable |
Part 7: The Watchable |
Part 8: The Flawed |
Part 9: The Failures
Every entry here’s rated 8 and a good number of them turn on an account the audience shouldn’t trust. The Usual Suspects is assembled in front of you out of whatever is in the room.
Memento runs backwards because its narrator can’t check anything. Primal Fear spends two hours establishing a condition and ninety seconds removing it.
The other thread is money. Following cost about six thousand dollars, Pi about sixty thousand, and both are debut features by directors who went on to spend two hundred million on a single picture. Neither film is worse for the constraint.
An eight from me means I had a good time and came away with one real complaint, and it’s the tier I’d pick from on any ordinary Friday night. The masterpieces in Part 1 ask a lot of you and the failures in Part 9 waste your evening. These twenty just work, and their flaws are the kind worth arguing about over dinner.
Every rating is the one carried by the review it links to. Ties are broken by year, and this is the fifth of nine parts.
The Usual Suspects, Memento and Following all reorganize chronology and only one of them cheats. Take the shapes apart in the Plot Handbook.
1. Under Siege 1 & 2 (1992, 1995) [full review]
► Read the full review of Under Siege 1 & 2 (1992, 1995)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.5/10
"Die Hard on a battleship, then Die Hard on a train, and the first one works."
Andrew Davis made the only Seagal film that works as a film, and he did it by treating the star as a fixed quantity and building an actual thriller around him. Casey Ryback is a cook on a battleship who used to be something else, and nobody discovers this until the midpoint.
Tommy Lee Jones and Gary Busey are doing most of the acting and both of them are enjoying themselves enormously. Strannix is a former CIA operative running a theatrical operation for money, and the film gives him enough grievance to be legible without explaining him at length.
The 1995 sequel moves the premise to a train and is a straight repeat with less craft. Geoff Murphy shoots the action competently and the confined geography of a locomotive can’t do what a battleship did, because there’s nowhere for anybody to hide. Davis went on to direct The Fugitive the following year off the strength of this one.
I prefer the first Under Siege to any other Seagal picture without a second thought, and the credit goes to Tommy Lee Jones tearing through that battleship like a man on vacation. What holds it at an eight for me is Seagal himself. The film has to work around him the way a builder works around a load-bearing wall, and the sequel shows how fast that falls apart when the people around him are less fun.
2. Basic Instinct (1992) [full review]
► Read the full review of Basic Instinct (1992)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.0/10
"Verhoeven made a film about a police force that cannot tell seduction from investigation."
Verhoeven and Joe Eszterhas made the most commercially successful erotic thriller ever released and the construction is far more careful than the reputation suggests. Every piece of evidence against Catherine Tramell is also evidence that she’s being framed. The film took over three hundred and fifty million dollars against a forty-nine million budget.
Sharon Stone plays a novelist who writes books that predict murders, and the film’s cleverest decision is that she’s never rattled. She controls every interrogation, she enjoys the attention, and Verhoeven never gives the audience a private moment to check her against. Verhoeven and Stone fought publicly throughout production and afterward. She’s the reason I rate it as high as I do, and she’s having a damn sight more fun than anybody else on screen. My reservation is Douglas, whose Curran is so sour I stopped caring whether he survives her.
Michael Douglas’s Nick Curran is the unpleasant part of the film and it’s deliberate. He’s killed civilians, he’s under psychiatric supervision, and his behavior toward Beth is indefensible. The picture is about a compromised man being outplayed. The film took over three Eszterhas was paid three million dollars for the spec script, a record at the time.
The ice pick under the bed is the last shot and it’s the correct ending. Verhoeven fought to keep it, and the whole film collapses into a different picture if the camera holds on the couple instead of moving down to the floor. Jan de Bont shot it two years before directing Speed himself.
3. The Usual Suspects (1995) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Usual Suspects (1995)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.5/10
"The story is assembled in front of you out of whatever happens to be in the room."
Bryan Singer made it for six million dollars and Christopher McQuarrie built the screenplay backward from a twist. That’s the film’s great strength and its permanent limitation. Verbal Kint tells a customs agent a story in an office and the film is the story being told.
Kevin Spacey won for a performance that works in two directions at once. Every tic, every hesitation and every piece of physical weakness is a construction, and the film only reveals the construction in its final ninety seconds. McQuarrie took the title from a Village Voice column before the screenplay existed.
The problem is that it survives exactly one viewing intact. A second pass reveals a plot with no obligations, because none of it happened, and scenes that played as suspense become a man improvising at a desk. That’s a defensible design and it’s also a cost.
Chazz Palminteri’s Kujan gets less credit than anybody. He’s intelligent and aggressive, and for ninety minutes somebody he correctly identifies as the weakest man in the room plays him. The bulletin board is the cruelest shot in nineties crime cinema. Singer shot the film in thirty-five days on borrowed San Pedro locations. Kujan’s the one I end up feeling for, and his scenes are what I’d go back for once the twist is spent.
4. Mission: Impossible (1996) [full review]
► Read the full review of Mission: Impossible (1996)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.2/10
"De Palma directing a franchise launcher, and the vault sequence has no dialogue."
De Palma took a television property and opened by killing the entire team in the first fifteen minutes, a aggressive way to start a franchise. Jim Phelps is the traitor, the original series fans objected loudly, and the film was right. Paramount had been trying to develop the property for the better part of a decade before this.
The Langley vault sequence is the set piece and it runs almost silent. Pressure-sensitive floor, temperature alarm, sound detection, and a man lowered on a wire who can’t sweat. De Palma establishes all three constraints before the break-in and then lets the audience track each one.
The plot is hard to follow on a first viewing and De Palma has said he doesn’t consider that a problem. The NOC list, the mole, the Job identity, the aquarium restaurant. What the film cares about is the mechanism of each sequence instead of the connective tissue.
Cruise was thirty-three and producing, and the career pivot happens here. The franchise’s entire later identity, practical stunts performed by the lead with a visible face, starts with him being lowered into that room on a wire. Emilio Estevez appears uncredited as Jack and dies in the opening sequence. That vault still gives me more of a thrill than anything the sequels staged, and I’ll put up with the tangled plot to get there.
Porter wants seventy thousand dollars, Creasy doesn’t want the job, and Casey Ryback never changes at all. Build a want that drives in the Protagonist Handbook.
5. Ransom (1996) [full review]
► Read the full review of Ransom (1996)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.7/10
"A father goes on television and offers the ransom as a bounty on the kidnappers instead."
Ron Howard remade a 1956 Glenn Ford picture and kept its one great idea: a father refuses to pay and puts the ransom on the kidnappers’ heads as a bounty instead. The film spends forty minutes as a conventional thriller before that decision. Howard had made Apollo 13 the previous year and shot this back to back with it.
Mel Gibson plays Tom Mullen as somebody whose confidence is the problem. He’s an airline owner who bribed a union official, he’s used to negotiating, and the film is careful that his refusal to pay is at least partly ego instead of strategy.
Gary Sinise’s Jimmy Shaker is a police detective running the kidnapping. The film reveals that early instead of holding it, and the choice converts the second half from a mystery into a contest between two men who both know. Howard ha It’s a remake of a 1956 Glenn Ford film built on the same central reversal.
The television broadcast is the sequence everybody remembers. Mullen on live news offering the money as a bounty, the kidnappers watching, and Howard shooting it as a man making a decision he can’t take back while his wife watches from a few feet away. Howard ha Richard Price and Alexander Ignon wrote the screenplay from the original story.
6. Primal Fear (1996) [full review]
► Read the full review of Primal Fear (1996)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.7/10
"Edward Norton’s debut, and the last ninety seconds reframe the whole film."
Gregory Hoblit adapted William Diehl and cast Edward Norton in his first film role against Richard Gere, and the entire picture exists to deliver a final scene. An altar boy is charged with murdering an archbishop and claims he can’t remember it. Leonardo DiCaprio got the first offer of the role and passed. Norton got the audition off the back of it.
Norton was twenty-six and had been doing theater.
The performance runs two characterizations, a stammering frightened boy and a violent second personality, and the film builds a legal strategy around the audience believing the first one. He was working off-Broadway and auditioned against roughly two thousand others. Norton is the whole reason I rate this film, and the courtroom around him mostly marks time until he’s allowed to turn.
The courtroom material is competent instead of exceptional and the film knows it. Laura Linney’s prosecutor is given real intelligence and no chance, Gere’s defense attorney is vain in a way the script keeps noting, and the church corruption subplot exists to supply motive. Leonardo DiCaprio was of Paramount had Gere attached first and built the production around his schedule.
7. Following (1998) [full review]
► Read the full review of Following (1998)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.4/10
"Nolan’s debut, shot on weekends for about six thousand dollars."
Nolan made it for around six thousand dollars, shooting on weekends across a year with a cast of friends, and the structure is already the one he’d use for the next twenty-five years. Three timelines cut together, identified by the protagonist’s haircut and clothing.
The premise is a writer who follows strangers for material and breaks his own rule by following the same man twice. Cobb burgles flats not to steal but to disrupt, and the argument he makes about people only valuing what they lose is the film’s one real idea.
It runs sixty-nine minutes and nothing in it is wasted. The black and white was a budget decision, the locations are friends’ apartments, and the entire film is legible because Nolan rehearsed every scene extensively before committing any of it to film he couldn’t afford to waste.
8. Pi (1998) [full review]
► Read the full review of Pi (1998)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.3/10
"Made for sixty thousand dollars raised a hundred at a time."
Darren Aronofsky made it for sixty thousand dollars raised in hundred-dollar increments from family and friends, shot on high-contrast black and white reversal stock that blows out every highlight, and won the directing prize at Sundance with it. Aronofsky paid back every hundred-dollar investor within a year of the Sundance sale.
Max Cohen is a number theorist with cluster headaches who believes the stock market has a pattern, and the film’s structure is his deterioration. Aronofsky uses a rig strapped to the actor so the camera moves with his head, putting the audience inside the migraine.
The two pursuing parties are the film’s best joke. A Wall Street firm wants the number for money and a Hasidic sect wants it because they believe it’s the true name of God, and both approach him with the same escalating politeness. Aronofsky paid The stock Aronofsky used was discontinued shortly afterward and is almost unusable now.
9. Ronin (1998) [full review]
► Read the full review of Ronin (1998)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.3/10
"The best car chases ever filmed, and nobody ever finds out what is in the case."
Frankenheimer was sixty-eight and made the best car chase film of the decade with practical vehicles, real streets and stunt drivers in the cars while the actors were filmed separately. Nothing in the Paris or Nice sequences is a model or a composite. Frankenheimer had made The Manchurian Candidate thirty-six years earlier and Grand Prix in 1966.
The plot is deliberately withheld and the film never explains it.
A case, several interested parties, and nobody ever states what’s inside. David Mamet did an uncredited rewrite and the dialogue carries his fingerprints in every scene about professional process. Frankenheimer had made The J. D. Zeik wrote the original screenplay and Mamet’s rewrite went uncredited by choice.
Frankenheimer used roughly three hundred stunt drivers across the Paris and Nice sequences and closed real streets for both. He’d made Grand Prix in 1966 and knew exactly what a camera mounted inside a moving car could and couldn’t deliver to an audience.
Robert De Niro’s Sam is the film’s engine and the character is defined entirely by caution. He checks exits, he refuses to enter a room he hasn’t scouted, and the ambush-versus-meeting conversation in the first act sets the terms for everything that follows. Frankenheimer had spent the preceding decade largely in television.
The Nice chase runs against traffic through a tunnel at real speed and Frankenheimer shot it with the camera inside the vehicles. Several of the cars were modified with the driver seated on the opposite side, so the actors could appear to be driving while a professional was.
The chases are why Ronin sits as high as it does for me, and they’re the standard I hold every car chase since against. What keeps it at an eight is the stretch between them. The dialogue has Mamet’s snap, but the shifting loyalties in the back half wore me out before the last chase arrived.
Munich tracks a man coming apart entirely through changing habits and never diagnoses him once. Learn the technique in the Showing and Telling Handbook.
10. Elizabeth (1998) [full review]
► Read the full review of Elizabeth (1998)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.4/10
"A political thriller that happens to be a costume drama."
Shekhar Kapur shot a Tudor succession story as a political thriller and the framing is the whole argument. Elizabeth inherits a throne, men calculating her removal surround her, and the film is about a woman learning that survival requires becoming something inhuman. Blanchett earned a nomination and lost to Gwyneth Paltrow. People are still arguing about it.
Cate Blanchett was twenty-nine and largely unknown outside Australia. The performance moves from frightened to calculating across two hours with no single scene of transformation, and the final sequence with the hair being cut is the outcome instead of the cause. Blanchett w Kapur had made Bandit Queen in India and had never worked in English before this.
Geoffrey Rush’s Walsingham is the film’s most interesting construction.
He has no sentimental loyalty at all, only a professional’s judgment that this monarch is the survivable option, and the film delivers the assassination montage near the end as housekeeping. Michael Hirst wrote it and went on to create The Tudors a decade afterward. Rush chills me every time he enters a room. The loose history grates on me more than I’d like, and his menace more than pays for it.
The history is loose and Kapur has been open about that. Compressions, invented conversations, a Duc d’Anjou played for comedy. What the film gets right is the atmosphere of a court where every conversation is a negotiation about whether the speaker will be alive next year.
11. Payback (1999) [full review]
► Read the full review of Payback (1999)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.1/10
"Two completely different films exist, and the director’s cut is the one to watch."
Two films exist under this title and the difference is instructive. Brian Helgeland adapted Richard Stark’s The Hunter, delivered a desaturated film in which Porter is unpleasant, and was removed from the project. Paramount reshot roughly a third of it with a new ending and a narration track.
The theatrical version is the one that works. The narration gives Porter a tone the director’s cut strips out entirely, Kris Kristofferson at the top of the organization supplies an antagonist with actual size, and the warmer ending works where the colder one simply stops.
The amount is the joke in both versions. Porter wants seventy thousand dollars, everybody he asks assumes he wants more, and the running gag is a criminal organization unable to process a man who means exactly what he says about a small number. Richard Stark published twenty-four Parker novels and never let the character be likeable.
12. Audition (1999) [full review]
► Read the full review of Audition (1999)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.1/10
"A romantic drama for an hour, and then it is not."
Takashi Miike opens with fifty minutes of a gentle romantic drama about a widower whose friend persuades him to hold fake film auditions to meet a wife. Audiences walked out of the last third at festivals and several screenings had medical staff on hand.
The tonal management is the achievement. Nothing in the first half is marked as wrong except a single shot of a sack in an apartment that moves, and Miike holds that image for several seconds and then returns to the romance for another twenty minutes.
Eihi Shiina plays Asami with almost no expression and a voice barely above a whisper, and the performance is the reason the film works, and not the violence. She’s sincere throughout, including at the end, and the film never converts her into a monster with a plan.
The last twenty minutes are difficult and the film has an argument underneath them about male self-deception. Aoyama’s entire courtship is a lie he told himself was harmless, and the film’s position is that the lie is where the horror starts. Miike shot it in about three weeks and has said he didn’t expect the reaction it got.
13. Memento (2000) [full review]
► Read the full review of Memento (2000)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.4/10
"Told backwards, because that is what it is like not to know how you got here."
Nolan adapted his brother’s short story and ran the film backward in color sequences interleaved with a forward-running black and white strand, and the two meet in the middle at the exact moment the audience learns what has been happening. Jonathan Nolan wrote the short story while his brother was already developing the film.
The structure is the condition. Leonard can’t form new memories, so the audience is put in his position by being denied everything that came before each scene. They know what’s about to happen and not what caused it, exactly his experience inverted. The two strands alternate throughout and converge in a single scene at the center.
Nolan shot it in twenty-five days for around nine million dollars and no distributor would take it for close to a year after it was finished. Newmarket eventually released it themselves and it took more than forty million, the reason Insomnia and Batman Begins happened. The Sammy Jankis material is the film’s real subject and most of the argument about the ending turns on it. Teddy’s account in the final scene reclassifies the entire story, and Nolan gives the audience exactly enough to believe him or to decide he’s lying to keep himself useful.
The gimmick label people slap on Memento misses that the backward structure is Leonard’s condition, and that’s the part I admire most. My reservation is the distance it creates. With every scene arriving stripped of its cause, I spent the film admiring the machine and never quite feeling for the man inside it.
Guy Pearce plays Leonard as somebody who has decided that having a purpose is worth more than having the truth, and the last line, delivered as a decision and not a confession, is the most chilling thing in the picture. He took the part for a fraction of his rate after one read.
Audition spends fifty minutes as a romance and Man on Fire spends an hour on swimming lessons. Learn what patience buys in the Pacing Handbook.
14. American Psycho (2000) [full review]
► Read the full review of American Psycho (2000)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.6/10
"An adaptation two other filmmakers walked away from."
Mary Harron adapted Bret Easton Ellis and made a comedy, the reading the novel supports and almost nobody expected. Patrick Bateman is a Wall Street executive who murders people and can’t get anybody to notice either the murders or him. Harron cast Bale over Leonardo DiCaprio and the studio replaced her briefly before reversing.
The business card scene is the film’s thesis in ninety seconds.
Four men comparing stationery with escalating distress, bone against eggshell, and Harron shoots it with the gravity of a hostage negotiation. Bateman nearly faints over a watermark. Harron cast Bale over L Guinevere Turner co-wrote the screenplay with Harron and appears in the film.
Christian Bale plays the part as performance. Bateman describes his morning routine in detail, lectures on Huey Lewis while wearing a raincoat, and says outright that there’s no real him. Nobody in the film listens to a word of it. Ellis has said the adaptation is better than he expected and funnier than the novel. I laughed at this more than at most comedies and felt a little uneasy about it. The ending’s refusal to commit is what keeps it at an eight for me.
Lions Gate replaced Harron with Oliver Stone and cast Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead, then reversed both decisions within months when DiCaprio left for The Beach. Harron returned with Bale, who had been her choice throughout and who nobody at the studio had wanted at any point. The ending refuses to confirm whether anything happened. A confession is dismissed, an apartment is empty and for sale, a lawyer claims to have had dinner with a man Bateman killed. Harron has said the murders happened and the novel is less certain than she is.
15. Man on Fire (2004) [full review]
► Read the full review of Man on Fire (2004)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.7/10
"Tony Scott at his most aggressive, and the first hour is the reason the second works."
Tony Scott adapted A. J. Quinnell, moved the story from Italy to Mexico City, and shot it with stuttering frame rates, burned-in subtitles that move around the frame and color that changes inside single scenes. The style divides people permanently. Scott had wanted to make it since 1980 and waited more than twenty years for the rights.
The first hour is the reason the second one works. Creasy is a burnt-out former operative who doesn’t want the job, and the film spends real time on a bodyguard and a nine-year-old becoming friends over swimming lessons and homework. Scott had wanted t Dakota Fanning was nine during the shoot and Washington has called her the reason it works.
Denzel Washington plays the drinking and the self-disgust without any of the dignity the part invites, and the film plays the scene in which he tries to shoot himself and the round fails to fire without music or comment. Scott filmed it largely in Mexico City with the cooperation of local authorities. This is Washington at his rawest, and it’s the performance of his I’d pick first. My gripe is Scott’s stuttering camera, which kept yanking me away from a face that needed the camera to hold still.
The revenge half is methodical and ugly. Creasy works up a chain, he uses explosives and improvised tools, and the film never presents any of it as satisfying. The exchange at the end is the only decision he makes that the picture treats as a victory.
16. Munich (2005) [full review]
► Read the full review of Munich (2005)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.5/10
"The least characteristic film Spielberg has made."
Spielberg adapted George Jonas’s Vengeance and made the least comfortable film of his career. A team is assembled after the 1972 Olympics to assassinate the people responsible and the picture is about what the work does to them across several years. Tony Kushner and Eric Roth share the screenplay credit and the argument over it was public.
The assassinations are deliberately incompetent. Bombs are too large, a target’s daughter answers a telephone, a hit on a woman in the Netherlands is protracted and shameful, and the film refuses to stage any of it with professional smoothness. Tony Kushner and Eric Spielberg shot it in Malta, Budapest and Paris over roughly four months.
Eric Bana’s Avner deteriorates in stages the film never announces. He starts checking hotel rooms, then dismantling telephones, then sleeping in a closet, and by the last act he’s unable to be in a room with a wall he hasn’t examined. Tony Kushner and Eric Daniel Craig was cast as Steve months before he was announced as Bond.
The film was attacked from every direction on release and Spielberg has said he expected that. It gives Palestinian characters an articulated position, it declines to endorse the operation, and the final shot of the New York skyline is the argument stated in one image.
17. Inside Man (2006) [full review]
► Read the full review of Inside Man (2006)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.6/10
"A bank robbery where nothing is stolen."
Spike Lee made a heist film in which the heist is a cover for something else entirely, and the structure is announced in the first line. Dalton Russell explains that he’ll tell the audience exactly what happened and then does, and it takes two hours to become comprehensible.
The robbers design the bank robbery to fail in a particular way. Hostages and robbers in identical jumpsuits, a hostage-negotiation stalemate, and the actual objective is a safe deposit box nobody will report missing because its owner can’t acknowledge its contents. It’s the highest-grossing film of Spike Lee’s career by a real margin.
Denzel Washington’s Frazier is under an internal investigation for missing money and the film uses that constantly. He’s negotiating while his own credibility is in question, and Chiwetel Ejiofor’s partner is watching him for reasons neither man discusses. It’s th Russell Gewirtz wrote it as a spec script and it sold in a weekend.
Jodie Foster’s Madeline White is the film’s oddest element, a fixer with access to everybody and no stated employer, and Lee uses her to show that the actual power in the story never enters the building. It’s th Lee shot it in New York with a crew he’d worked with across several films.
Eastern Promises teaches you to read a criminal record off a man’s back without a word of exposition. Study the method in the World Builder’s Handbook.
18. Sunshine (2007) [full review]
► Read the full review of Sunshine (2007)
IMDb: 7.5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.2/10
"Two-thirds of an excellent film, and the argument about the last third has run for twenty years."
Danny Boyle sent a ship to restart a dying sun and Alex Garland wrote it with physicists consulting, and the first two acts are the most rigorous science fiction thriller of the decade. Resource decisions, oxygen arithmetic, and a crew arguing about mission priority. Brian Cox consulted on the physics and the crew trained with him before shooting began.
The Icarus I distress beacon is the hinge. The crew finds a second ship that failed seven years earlier and decides to investigate, and the film is honest that the decision is defensible and wrong. Every later death traces back to it. Brian Cox consult Boyle and Garland had made 28 Days Later together three years earlier.
The visual scheme is the achievement. The sun is photographed as unbearable instead of beautiful, the observation deck sequences are shot through filters that only permit a fraction of the light, and John Murphy’s score does more emotional work than the screenplay does. Brian Cox consult The cast lived together in university halls for two weeks before filming.
The third act converts into a slasher film and the argument about that’s never settled. Boyle has defended it as the only honest ending, the crew’s mission succeeds, and the shift in genre is jarring enough that most viewers rate the film on how they took it.
I’m firmly in the camp that thinks the slasher turn cost Sunshine a place much higher in this series. The first two acts are the best hard science fiction thriller I can name from that decade, and then the oxygen arithmetic gives way to a killer stalking the corridors. The sun photography and Murphy’s score keep it at an eight for me, and I’m still a little sore about the rest.
19. The Brave One (2007) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Brave One (2007)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.7/10
"A vigilante film that lets its protagonist narrate her own deterioration."
Neil Jordan directed Jodie Foster as a radio host whose fiance is killed in a Central Park attack that leaves her hospitalized, and the film is a vigilante picture that keeps refusing to be satisfying about it. Foster produced it herself and has said the ending was the reason she nearly walked away.
Foster plays Erica as somebody who’s frightened of what she’s doing while doing it. The first shooting is panic, the second is less so, and the film tracks her getting used to it through her own radio broadcasts, the smartest device in the script.
Terrence Howard’s Detective Mercer is the film’s real problem and its most interesting one. He works out what she is, he likes her, and the ending has him handing her his own weapon to stage a scene. Jordan has been criticized for it and the criticism is fair.
20. Eastern Promises (2007) [full review]
► Read the full review of Eastern Promises (2007)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.6/10
"The tattoos are the central idea and they are not decoration."
Cronenberg followed A History of Violence with another film about a man performing an identity, set in the Russian mafia in London. Viggo Mortensen learned enough Russian to pass, studied the tattoo system, and the film treats the ink as a readable criminal record. Mortensen visited Russian prisons during preparation and was mistaken for a local.
The bathhouse fight deserves its reputation. Mortensen is naked, unarmed and fighting two men with linoleum knives, Cronenberg shoots it in long takes with no score, it takes a long time, he’s badly hurt, and nobody in it looks competent. Mortensen visited Russi Steven Knight wrote it and had written Dirty Pretty Things four years before.
Naomi Watts carries the other half and the film gives her the least interesting material. The midwife investigating a dead girl’s diary is a device for entering the organization, and the picture’s interest visibly drains whenever it leaves Mortensen and Vincent Cassel.
Mortensen was nominated for Best Actor and lost to Daniel Day-Lewis. He’s so good that I resented every cut away from him, and that imbalance is the whole reason the film stops at an eight.
The reveal reframes the whole film and Cronenberg refuses to celebrate it. The last scene is Nikolai alone at the head of a table having achieved exactly what he was sent to achieve, shot as a life sentence instead of a victory. Mortensen visited Russi Cronenberg shot the bathhouse sequence across two days in a real London facility.
Honorable Mentions: Thrillers Without a Review Here Yet
No review on the site for any of these so far. Each belongs in this tier or above and each is on the list.
Capricorn One (1977)
Peter Hyams staged a faked Mars landing and then had the astronauts become a liability. The desert pursuit with two biplanes and a helicopter is good and Elliott Gould is the reporter.
The Long Good Friday (1980)
Bob Hoskins plays a London gangster whose empire is dismantled across one Easter weekend by an enemy he can’t identify. The last shot is four minutes of his face in the back of a car.
Cutter’s Way (1981)
Jeff Bridges and John Heard investigate a murder neither of them can prove, and the film is really about a damaged veteran who needs the conspiracy to be true. It disappeared on release and has been rediscovered repeatedly since.
Prince of the City (1981)
Lumet ran three hours on a narcotics detective who agrees to inform and discovers there’s no version of cooperation that ends well. Treat Williams is in almost every scene.
State of Grace (1990)
Sean Penn goes back to Hell’s Kitchen as an undercover officer among the friends he grew up with, and Gary Oldman plays the one who can’t be managed. It was released the same week as Goodfellas and vanished.
Jacob’s Ladder (1990)
Adrian Lyne built a Vietnam veteran’s disintegration out of subway platforms, hospital corridors and faces shot at the wrong frame rate. A decade of horror games copied the visual technique.
The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992)
Rebecca De Mornay takes a nanny position with a plan and the film is patient about how long the family takes to see it. The greenhouse sequence is the best thing in the nineties domestic thriller cycle.
Single White Female (1992)
Jennifer Jason Leigh moves in and begins replacing her roommate one detail at a time. The haircut scene is the moment the film turns and it’s staged without a word of explanation.
Pacific Heights (1990)
John Schlesinger built a thriller out of tenancy law, with Michael Keaton as a resident who can’t be removed and doesn’t have to break any laws to destroy two people.
Dead Again (1991)
Kenneth Branagh runs two timelines in color and black and white with the same actors, and the reveal about who was who’s well hidden. Derek Jacobi is the hypnotist.
The Last Seduction (1994)
Linda Fiorentino plays the most ruthless character in nineties American film and the picture never once asks the audience to like her. It went to television first and was disqualified from the Academy Awards for it.
Red Rock West (1993)
Nicolas Cage is mistaken for a hitman in a Wyoming bar and takes the money, then meets the actual hitman. John Dahl keeps escalating a small mistake for ninety minutes.
Dishonorable Mentions: Thrillers That Failed
Also unreviewed here. Each had a premise worth the budget and lost it somewhere between the pitch and the edit.
Man on a Ledge (2012)
Sam Worthington on a hotel ledge as a distraction for a heist happening next door, a fine premise undone by a conspiracy requiring a dozen people to behave irrationally on schedule.
Contraband (2012)
Mark Wahlberg on a smuggling run with a plot that adds a new complication every fifteen minutes until none of them matter. The Panama sequence belongs in a different film entirely.
Hide and Seek (2005)
De Niro and Dakota Fanning in a film with four alternative endings shot because nobody could agree which one worked. The released version resolves an imaginary friend plot in a way the preceding ninety minutes contradict.
Perfect Stranger (2007)
Halle Berry and Bruce Willis in a thriller whose killer was changed during production, and the final reveal requires a character to have done things the film showed somebody else doing.
Killer Elite (2011)
Statham, Owen and De Niro in a film based on a book whose factual claims were disputed, with a conspiracy explained twice and clear neither time. The action is competent and attached to nothing.
Sabotage (2014)
David Ayer gave Schwarzenegger a DEA team being killed one at a time and a reveal that contradicts the team dynamic established for ninety minutes. The tone swings without any control at all.
What Do You Think?
Every film on this page rates an 8, so the ordering is chronological and the arguing has to happen about membership instead of rank. My vote is that Elizabeth belongs, and people who wave costume drama off the thriller shelf are being snobs. A court where any conversation might get you killed is as tense as any bank job on this page. Plenty of people will object to it first anyway, so tell me whether it belongs.
Continue the Series
Part 1: The Masterpieces |
Part 2: The Near Perfect |
Part 3: The Excellent |
Part 4: The Very Good |
Part 5: The Solid Craft |
Part 6: The Dependable |
Part 7: The Watchable |
Part 8: The Flawed |
Part 9: The Failures
