Oddly meandering movie about power games; concluding that those with the greatest political influence are those best able to get both ends of the political spectrum to play against the middle. Yet power shifts depending on whether or not you can get your enemies to fear you: Not whether or not you are actually powerful. Your power is thus largely in their minds only and can only be sustained by vain attempts to control their thoughts.
However, this is a study of bullying (& its corollary: Revenge) that lacks much insight. All it has to offer is the fact that sadists are really all masochists; needing to keep their victims alive for them to have someone to beat – and for someone to beat them, too. All this is expressed via a Theatre of Cruelty and a Grand Guignol sensibility that fails to properly engage such dramatic antecedents, primarily by merely playing at psychological cruelty and being afraid to present much gore.
None of this is helped by the fact that the characters are mere archetypes – albeit played with as much conviction as any decent actor could play them.
Copyright © 2009 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com/) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.
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