Issa Karpov illegally immigrated to Hamburg where he gets caught up in the international war on terror. But maybe he isn’t exactly as he seems?
This film starts off pretty slow, but that’s ok because you need the build up and some background on the different characters. After a while though I was left wondering if it was still trying to build everything up or just lost in itself. I don’t think it particularly helped that I was pretty tired when going to see this at the cinema, but I would have loved to have left and gone home. Like a couple of people did less than half way through the film.
It did keep crossing my mind that this was Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s final full film role. His character Gunter was awkward and not really very nice to watch at times. You do however begin to feel sorry for him as the story goes on and lets face it the ending is pretty … Well tragic and also annoying. I won’t spoil why it is either of those but I hope when you see this film you will understand (and agree) with what I mean.
The performances are decent and I thought it was pretty hard-hitting to start a film mentioning 9/11 and then having it released the following day in cinemas. Really did make you think about that truly awful event which occurred. Maybe a bit close to the edge but just showing how views on terrorism had changed since then. Also to help build up that people can be labelled something they actually are not.
Issa Karpov becomes involved with lawyer Annabel Richter, who got herself in a situation which is totally out of her league. The amount of money that could be changing hands is pretty unreal especially with where it had come from. I don’t think I am doing a very good job in describing much of the plot but don’t really want to spoil too much. Although I wouldn’t really recommend this film as wouldn’t want the blame for someone else wasting 2 hours watching this.
I honestly just felt robbed at the end as was expecting something better after sitting through some awful scenes with Hoffman breathing heavily, it has actually taken me days to put together this review as I really could not put any thoughts together on it. I understand what they were trying to do about the terrorism and everything like that. But I don’t think this really deserved a big cinema release.
Very interested to know if anyone enjoyed this one?
