The Engineer

Supposed true tale "The Engineer" shoulda been topical & interesting, but its production standards (under director Danny A Abeckaser), writing (Kosta Kondilopoulos) & acting are SO bad it fails completely. In 1995 Yahya Ayyash (Adam Haloon) masterminded horrific Hamas terrorist bombings across Israel - so was hunted in Gaza by Shin Bet agents (led by Emile Hirsch (of the tanked career)) and an ex-Mossad hit squad (led by Angel Bonanni - funded by US Sentaor Robert Davi who wants to personlly kill Ayyash to avenge his daughter who died in the attacks (true story huh?)). This cheap, pitiful tosh is certainly NOT another "Zero Dark Thirty".

Never seen such a important issue like the Israel/Palestine conflict treated so poorly and ultimately in such a disrespectful manner.

The acting is appalling and the script seems to have been written by amateurs, with more plot holes than a suisse cheese. Saddens me to see a good actor like Emile Hirsch envolved with such a bad movie.

Movies that adress real life situations have the responsability to work as educational tool for the audience, but this one goes in the opposite direction.

All the victims of this horrible war that lasts for decades deserved a better homage.

I love cinema, this is not cinema.

This film is pretty bad. The actors look as if they are not even trying to act. The story is super slow and seems like it is wasting time just to get the characters to different scenes. There is not much action at all and the action which is on the screen has close ups of the actors faces and a lot of shaking which makes it hard to make out what is going on most of the time. It is a film in which you would not want to watch if you knew it would be of such lack of quality. I would not recommend this movie to anyone I know. The only reason I watched it because the lead actor usually does good work, I am afraid that is no longer the case.

After just finished watching pretty much the exact same filmmakers and cast in the Inside Man that was very impressive for an indie production, this film does a 180 and was shockingly a huge mess. I'm a fan of "based on true events" films, especially when they are filmed effectively like Inside Man which was done right for an indie B-film, but sadly this wasn't one of those. The entire normally comfortable 92 min runtime dragged on and on endlessly, with horrible pacing, lackluster direction that made even the few action scenes boring, and a story that was choppy and convoluted. It's hard to believe it was the same writers and directors that made both films, as they are night and day. It's too bad, this had promise, but it just failed to deliver the goods.

I know this is a made for streaming kind of film and low budget, but still.. this was sold as an action movie so why is it so boring? The action they do have in it is riddled with jump cuts and shaking camera movements so you can hardly tell what is going on. I know, they do that because this is a low budget film and they have to hide the action because it will look bad if we can actually see a whole body moving at once. Usually you can overlook the lack of action if the plot is good but it is choppy and random. Almost like they wrote the dialogue on set. I'm guessing this was made during the writer's strike.