jon503

"This Man" is about as standard plot-wise as action movies get. A lone wolf type takes a little girl under his wing, the kid gets kidnapped, and he ends up having to go through heaps of bad guys in his quest to save the girl.

By all accounts, the movie should have evoked little more than a shrug. After all, anyone who has seen even just a moderate amount of action movies will have seen countless movies with variations of this basic plot. One might think of "Leon" or "Man on Fire" for some closer examples, or movies such as "Taken" in other respects.

What made this movie into my favorite action movie in a long while is the execution of that basic plot. "This Man" manages to create just the right dark, gloomy mood to match the story and all the characters are believable. None of the scenes appear contrived or overly tear-jerker. Another vital aspect for an action movie is, of course, that the action sequences are very well done. The movie is quite graphic, but not gratuitously so or for its own sake such as in many a recent horror movie (the Saw series comes to mind).

I guess the movie could be likened to a good apple pie - certainly nothing revolutionary, in fact quite the staple of its genre, but who would want to turn down a really good apple pie with quality ingredients?

I do not rate movies 1 out of 10 very often, but this movie is truly terrible. Michael Bay once again succeeded in completely missing the point of what CG is all about. CG is a tool, not a replacement for any coherent plot and even acceptable acting. I do not expect a popcorn action movie to have a really intricate plot line or first class acting, but some minimum is required; you can only gloss over so many insufficiencies with more explosions and CG. The movie is incredibly fast-paced, which I attribute to an attempt to prevent movie-goers from stopping to think about all the plot holes and sappy lines. Non of the characters are at all fleshed out, the characters added for comic relief are simply annoying and not even remotely funny.

To sum this movie up in a few words I'd say that anyone planning on watching it can prepare for a bunch of well-animated CG explosions and machine gun-totting robots, but nothing in terms of plot or acting.

I was thinking for a minute about how to caption this movie, and as you can see, I went with 'interesting', that wonderful word you can use when you really don't know what to make of something but want to be polite. I'm not just being polite though, it really was interesting. The movie was advertised as a comedy, and the basic premise clearly sets it up in this manner. Yet despite its often quirky, sometimes hilarious moments, the movie seems conflicted as to what it sets out to be. There are some allusions to controversial practices of the US military such as those seen in Abu Ghraib which had me trying to interpret the movie as a satirical depiction of military transgressions. Such critique is not pointed enough to amount to a real persiflage, however. The result was not so much a thought-provoking comedy, perhaps the intended effect, but rather a movie where the viewer is tempted to over-intellectualize about its purpose while watching it - not a good sign.

As to the performances, the acting was satisfactory, but nobody really shone. Then again, I didn't find any of the characters to be complex enough to inspire or require above-average acting. Even though he is an accomplished actor easily up to the task, I kept wondering whether Ewan McGregor was cast simply because he was Obi-Wan Kenobi in the new Star Wars movies, or whether that was just an added bonus for the director to play with. Either way, I'm afraid they overdid the Jedi references, which were funny at most the first two or three times.

These flaws notwithstanding, the movie is interesting because it really makes you want to jump on Wikipedia and check out what is known about the actual US Army Psy-Ops project (which I'm going to do after writing this review, I know I've heard that the staring at goats actually happened). I definitely did not regret watching this movie, though I do not know whether I would have gone to see it in the theater if I'd known what it was like. I recommend catching it on pay-per-view or renting it at blockbuster.