Prueba de vida

What happens in real life will inevitably have an effect on the reel one. Tom Cruise learnt that with his strange antics in real life - his screen one suffered with a less than expected stellar box office for M:I:3 despite positive critical reviews. Way back in 2000, Russell Crowe and Meg Ryan learnt that too, with their rumoured romance while shooting this movie, one of the many reasons resulting in this becoming a box office bomb.

I felt that it was not a bad movie actually, given the story which I found interesting in the first place, for its extremely distant relation to what I'm doing, and being an action adventure movie, it works with its fair share of big action sequences.

Russell Crowe plays Terry Thorne, a consultant in the Security and Crisis Response Unit of Luthan Risk International. His job is to negotiate the safe return of Kidnap and Ransom (K&R) victims around the world, and of course, this brings him frequently to where the action is, during the payment of ransoms and the extraction of hostages. He yearns for a management role, but as always, if you're an excellent field operative, you're played to your strengths out there.

Which brings him to his latest client, Meg Ryan's Alice Bowman, whose husband Peter Bowman (David Morse), an employee with the biggest international oil firmed, gets kidnapped by chance during a raid in Ecuador. There are numerous scenes in the movie to perk your interest in this much behind-the-scenes industry of K&R, the terrorist(?) groups' motivation, and how the entire business is conducted, with the engagement of peers as well as the involvement of shady government personnel.

There are many fine touches that might go unnoticed, like how network of contacts and peers are milked, cooperation extended, the wheelings and dealings of large multinational corporations, and politics in general. But the focus moves quickly towards a micro one, that between Thorne and Alice Bowman, as he accomplishes to build her trust in him that he's the best in the business and knows what he's doing.

Perhaps this is one of the rare movies that allowed Crowe to be an Australian (and keep the accent) in a Hollywood production. His Thorne is oozes enough machismo to carry the action through and is credible enough to be believed as a veteran in the business. Meg Ryan this time round has a more serious character to play, albeit at times a weepie one, steering well clear of the pretty ditzy blonde comedic roles she has become accustomed to. They had probably shot some love scenes for this movie, but I suppose the bad press resulted in those scenes ending up on the cutting room floor. The romance between the character was also almost squashed out, save for the out of place suggestion of a strong physical attraction which rears its ugly head in the second half of the movie, slowing the pace down a little without much mature development. I thought that should it had been removed entirely, it'll probably end up a stronger movie, with Thorne more in character as a mission driven individual.

The first David, David Caruso, is finding a new lease of life back in television with CSI, since branching off to movies after NYPD Blue didn't augur too well for him. I thought his performance here was nothing much to shout about though. However David Morse, who usually plays supporting roles, put up an adequately engaging Peter Bowman as an executive caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, and examines the fear and desperation of a man kidnapped and constantly at the wrong end of a gun barrel.

The theme song by Danny Elfman is addictive (time to hunt it down), and the end credits was played over a helicopter view of the entire Ecuadorian landscape, just beautiful to look at. Clocking at just over 2 hours, it provided some good entertainment for a lazy Sunday afternoon.

Code 3 DVD contains the behind the scenes making-of documentary (13" 40'), the theatrical trailer, and the feature length audio commentary by director Taylor Hackford.

I like this film. I must admit that a part of me was hoping for the typical chick flic ending, but if I'd actually gotten it I'm sure I wouldn't have liked the movie as much. The movie was more believable than I've come to expect from action films, with the possible exception of the bravado of the captive husband. I find it hard to believe that someone in that situation would be so constantly antagonistic to their captors. Sure, you might have a moment or two where you'd just had enough and had to push back, but I find it hard to believe that you'd be that way ALL the time.

But the negotiations were believable for the most part, and the growing attraction between the leads was done nicely.

Maureen O'Hara stars in a movie where her husband gets kidnapped those damn commies in South East Asia so she hires tough and dashing soldier of fortune Clark Gable to save the day

That's not the cast or the location of PROOF OF LIFE but it does have a very similar plot . Did someone mention this was a 1940s matinée blockbuster ? Just curious because while I was watching the movie I was struck by how old fashioned everything felt . Russell Crowe plays an Aussie who served in the SAS and saves a Frenchman from the Chechens in the opening sequence , but you could have had Gable playing an American paratrooper saving someone from the Red Army on the River Elbe in May 1945 . Different actor , different period of history , different enemy but still the same basic story with the action switching from Europe to say South East Asia in 1950

That's not to say PROOF OF LIFE is a bad film . It's not and I found it mainly entertaining though perhaps a little too long . It's just that it is so old fashioned that you can see where the predictable story threads are going to begin and end . You can't deny that both the cast and action scenes are good , it's just that you also can't stop thinking it would have been better if it'd been filmed in monochrome and directed by Michael Curtiz with no bad language or sexual references

This looked like something made in the 80s, what with the Rambo/Uncommon Valor Finale, the psuedo-James Bondish globe trotting of Crowe in the lead and of course, Meg Ryan. I didn't mind this much, but there are a few things wrong with it...

One-it takes TOO long to get to the Rambo finale, which by the way is handled pretty well. You expect going in, to see Crowe taking at least half the flick to go in and get the poor guy being held hostage in the Andes. Not so. He spends instead an awful lotta time yakking into a two way radio with the baddies or pacing around some office or room or whatever. They needed to tighten THAT up.

Two-Meg Ryan while I like her, didn't seem to bring very much to this. I donno, she reminded me of her character from 'You've Got Mail'-it was almost as if she left Set#1 and went right onto Set#2 without skipping a beat. Not enough 'gravitas' to the casting or role.

Pamela Reed was kinda irritating but at least seemed like she gave a hang about her brother being held. They never Did bother to explain to us how she scraped up the lions share of that $600K by the way(which they never hadda use)either....

Crowe I like, in a Robert Mitchum kinda way this guy's the real deal. He was so good in the Rescue scenes that ya wish they'd turned this more into a 'Predator/Uncommon Valor' type flick and gone with that. I was reminded of 'Predator' in fact in the helicopter over the jungle shots....

For the most part, I consider this to be a mature, intelligent presentation-but there needs to be some more thinking to what exactly kinda film it is they want to make. The opening scenes in Chechenya are so effective, you wind up being disappointed and surprised in fact that it's Not That kinda flick; more negotiating and hostage scenes than anything else.

(I also, for what it's worth, will tip my hat to both the 'Missionary Guy' and David Morse, they were good. Morse usually is, in things like the Rock and whatever. And David Caruso seemed to be enjoying himself too-he was alright. Quite a comedown from NYPD Blue though, eh? He has disappeared pretty much...)

Overall-it's not bad, more a good VCR than anything else....

** outta ****

I was impressed by Proof of Life and would only make one comment. In most movies, the plot is tightened up to be fast-paced, convincing, make you identify with and care about the characters, and even contain a little moral or have something to say about the human condition.

When a film like Proof of Life is based on a true story, there are limits to this. The worst example I can think of being A Civil Action, which I'm sure is true to the story but the ending was not satisfying and deflated the entire film.

So it's definitely worth seeing, but it's a little slow, and like real life the there is no consistent "tone" to the plot twists. (The film does not fit neatly into one genre throughout.)

Who should see this film:

-- Action buffs who won't mind that only some stuff blows up and the film is a little arty

-- Drama fans who are curious about the topic, but who are not expecting a romance and won't mind a little violence

-- People who'd like some gritty realism concerning Latin American civil uprisings

I give "Proof of Life" a 7 out of 10.