gippas

Watched the movie at Thessaloniki Film Festival I enjoyed the Vanishing Soldier - The direction is pacey, the main character likeable and it gives a glimpe of daily life in today's Israel that is even more timely at this time (Fall 2023), after the escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

However I have to say I enjoyed it despite its flaws, which lie mostly in the script. A script that tries to balance betweem drama and screwball comedy at times and in the end cannot find the right analogy. There are too many comic substories which push crediblity at a point where it makes it improbable, without really adding anything. In the end it feels a bit like "American Pie and the Israeli army."

Modern Greek cinema hasn't had the easiest of relationships with Athens, the mega capital of Greece where around half of the population lives. It usually prefers to set its stories in the countryside, or in the no man's lands of domestic hell, as was the case with Dogtooth, Greek cinema's biggest export of the last decade.

Alexis Alexiou, the director of Tetarti 04:45 (Wednesday 04:45) goes to the opposite direction. His camera seems determined to shoot every street light and road bump of night time Athens. However, he doesn't really want to capture the city but rather transform it to Hong Kong, the source of his movie's inspiration.

Because Tetarti is essentially a Hong Kong thriller set in Athens. Unfortunately, that is the movie's eventual downfall. Alexiou the director can recreate all the slow motion shots and shooting duels that characterize the genre with gusto and flair albeit without bringing something really new to the blueprint set by masters like John Woo. His kraft however is let down by Alexiou the screenwriter. His efforts to weave into the story the social realities created by the ongoing financial crisis in Greece are mostly schematic and the plot itself simplistic at best. Club owner owns debt to Romanian kingpin, is being assigned a task he doesn't want to execute and the end is utterly and tediously predictable. Most of the actors, with the exception of Mainas, fall victim to the paper thin characters and Adam Bousdoukos, who has the second meatiest part, doesn't really deliver.

Tetarti can only be recommended for hardcore addicts of Hong Kong thrillers. For the rest, the repeated traveling night shots of Athenian highways lit by the reddish street lights will eventually overstay their welcome and there will be little left to keep them intrigued.