Incendiary

An awful waste of 1 hour and 35 minutes. Don't do this to yourself, unless you really enjoy pretentious melodramas with little or no story.

According to the producers, and IMDb, this is a "Drama/Romance/Thriller". Make no mistake - it is not romance, and most certainly not a thriller.

"Like watching paint dry" is an old saying, and probably as meaningless a way of spending time as watching "Incendiary". Still, many of us are likely never to have sat down for an hour and a half to watch paint dry, whereas we have all seen the clichées and the pretentious rubbish which makes up this utterly awful movie. We've seen it all before, though fortunately rarely in such a mindblowingly slooow pace and without virtually any story or message behind it.

I is usually a bad sign when, 20 minutes into a film, still nothing has happened, and the information conveyed would easily fit into less than a minute. In this case, it is indeed fully indicative of what's to come: more of the same.

The story as such can be told in it's entirety in a few sentences and scenes, which in fact it also is - the remainder of the of the movie just consists of endless, clichéd retrospectives, soul searching dialogs, marathon shots of facial expressions, you name it...

Some have criticized the plausibility and credibility of the storyline, very often a problem with today's movies, but that's hardly where this movie falls down - it's in the fact that the story could easily have been told in ten minutes. It would still have been pointless, un-interesting and without meaning or message, but at least it would have been over quickly...

This cod mockney melodrama from the director of Bridget Jones Diary fails at every level. It's clearly a film involving working class characters made by middle class people with both characters and plot lacking any authenticity and credibility whatsoever. In fact, the basic premise of Bridget Jones is transposed to this disastrous attempt at making a serious drama. Instead of writing a diary she writes letters to Osama Bin Laden. Instead of getting caught in a love triangle between Colin Firth and Hugh Grant she gets caught in a love triangle with two equally wet englishmen, uncomfortably played by Ewan MacGregor and Matthew Macfadayen, and all this, after her poor husband and son have been blown to bits in an unconvincing attack on Arsenal football stadium whilst she was shagging the local taloid newspaper reporter! The mawkish sentimentality that ensues is unbearable. In a preposterous celebration of London's blitz spirit, the faces of the victims are printed on the side of WWII air balloons which float above the city in every shot. And Michelle Williams, who miraculously found her sons toy rabbit in the ruins of the football stadium, clutches it to her chest in almost every scene. I find it hard to believe that this ill conceived script ever made it past treatment stage, particularly when so many established UK film companies like CH4 were involved in its development and finance. I find it equally hard to believe that the film was selected to screen at prestigious festivals like Sundance.This film is a worrying indictment of the failings of a the British film industry.

A young beautiful woman (Michelle Williams) is trapped in an empty marriage tucked away in an ugly apartment block in London. Her pride and joy in her grey existence is her 4-year-old son. One day, as the two of them are at the football match, she seduces a slick journalist Jasper (Ewan McGregor) in the local pub. As fate would have it, they are locked in a lovers embrace, with the football match raging on behind them on TV, when the stadium going up in flames with a series of explosions. Her husband and son are both killed in the terrorist attack, leaving her broken and alone.

If you are now thinking that a film about the aftermath of a major terrorist attack from the director of Brigit Jones' Diary sounds like a recipe for disaster, then you are partly right. But it is not bad for the reason you might think. The film is, for the most part, an emotional roller- coaster - you could be crying your way through most of it. But not because of her grieving for her lost family. The bombs are just the beginning - she still has to endure a full load of unlikely events in the hour to come. She understandably loses it along the way as the story becomes so over-dramatised that it is just ridiculous (especially when you run the story back in your head afterwards).

Towards the end she enters a phase of grief hallucination and reconciliation with life. As the movie is neither funny nor exciting, this should have been the route to take all along. Concentrating on the mourning of the young mother, and perhaps even throwing in some guilt towards her semi-estranged husband. Her husband is just gone with his death. He is not missed nor is there any regret for his disappearance. Even for a semi-estranged husband this sounds a little harsh - she did worry about him, after all, so she must have felt something. It is also curious that they have no family, or friends who drop by to comfort her. A lonely marriage must have pushed them into some kind of a social circle, or a hobby, or at least the occasional phone call with their mothers. Was their life really that lonely.

The movie is clearly intended as a pamphlet against terrorism, by showing the human cost at the level of ordinary people. It also takes the time to "explain" the resilience of London in a voice-over. It is a little desperate to save a movie through nationalism, but can actually be fit in here, although it could have been better prepared, by, for instance, by making her a more integral part of London. This is no masterpiece, nor an entertainment jewel, and can easily be missed altogether. A pity, because it does have some potential.

I have seen a negative review on this movie and I have to say that I am very tired of people picking apart movies to show how smart they think they are! This was a tragic and beautifully filmed movie that reminded me so much of The Sweet Hereafter. I believe that some people have a hard time watching others go through tragedy and grief and are uncomfortable expressing themselves. This movie drew a lump to my throat the size of a golf ball and made me hug my son extra hard at bedtime. Michelle Williams gives another outstanding performance and Ewan MacGregor is, as always, a complete pleasure to watch on screen. This film will come out on DVD this year and I would urge anyone with a heart to embrace it.

A young mother sees her husband and four-year old son off to a soccer match. She then goes home and puts the match on the television. As she watches there are explosions at the stadium. A terrorist attack kills her husband, who she didn't much like anyway, and her son, who she loved dearly, along with a thousand or so others. Oh, and as the young mother watches this unfold on the television screen she is at that moment having sex with another man.

This seems to set up a story about the young mother's guilt and grief. And there's some of that. But there's a bunch of other stuff too, none of which really works. There are conspiracy thriller elements which go practically nowhere. There are romantic entanglements as a couple of men who should really know better try to swoop in on the newly widowed young mother. In a portion of the film which strains credulity to the breaking point we see the young mother reach out to the son of one of the suicide bombers. The film goes off in so many different directions that it ends up being quite a mess. The young mother manages to hold herself together remarkably well given the circumstances. For a while anyway. But eventually she starts to crack and when she does the movie cracks too. At this point it is beyond repair.

If there is anything positive to say it is that, working from a rather lousy script, Michelle Williams still does remarkably well in the role of the young mother. Whatever little successes this movie has belong to Williams. Ewan McGregor is at least passable as one of her suitors. As the other Matthew Macfadyen is a total dud and he also draws the shortest straw, getting the absolute worst of all the film's terrible dialogue. Some of the things this character says are just laughably, impossibly bad. He speaks in a way human beings simply do not speak. The film aims for melodrama but misses the mark. The story doesn't really engage and it moves at a snail's pace. A story more focused on the mother herself and the way she coped with this tragedy might have worked. But this movie gets bogged down as it veers off in other directions. Williams does the best she can but her noble effort can't save this dud.