O Engenheiro

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.

I don't get how they failed so badly with this movie. They took a bunch of brilliant actors who I have seen excel in other shows (such as Fauda) and made this movie that just doesn't work. I think the biggest mistake was having everyone (Israelis, arabs) speaking in English to each other. It takes away so much authenticity from the movie. They should have just let everyone speak in their own languages and that's it. The way they speak when it's in English just feels so fake and takes away from the acting. There's minimal character development, too little action and you don't get invested in any of the characters. This had SO much potential but utterly failed. I love movies and shows in this genre and couldn't believe the other reviews but they were spot on sadly :(

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".

I love Emile Hirsch and he was outstanding in Into The Wild, Lone Survivor and Alpha Dog...but this film was so poorly done and characters were not cast appropriately. Emile looked like a fish out of water trying to portray this character. I would expect so much more from him because I know he's talented. The acting was some of the worst, most lackluster and boring that I've seen to date. I could not even finish the movie. I fell asleep halfway through and I never fall asleep watching movies. Poorly filmed, poorly directed, poorly executed. This story had potential to be interesting and gripping .... but it failed miserably. I would not recommend.

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.