Roman Polanski's thriller has been hailed as a return to form for the master filmmaker. For many people this was a return to Polanski's early days when he turned out wicked thrillers. For me this is a neat little thriller that loses its way in the second hour.
The plot of the film has the body of a man washing up on the coast of Maine. The man disappeared from a ferry and some how ended up in the water. Enter Ewan McGregor who is hired to take over for the dead man- ghostwriting the memoirs of a former British Prime Minister. As McGregor soon finds out sometimes its best not to dig too deeply into one's subject.
I loved the first hour and a bit of this film. It was a wickedly clever little thriller that cranked things up with his mix of politics and menace. The intrigue of the politics and spy games really helped to keep us focused on what was going on.
Then something happened. Somewhere the film became less about the MacGuffin of the politics and drifted more and more into being a conventional thriller. The plot which had galloped along for most of the first say 80 minutes, suddenly stopped adding layers and simply became McGregor trying to find out how to stay alive. Sure he was still trying to find out new wrinkles in the tale, but at the same time he wasn't doing a whole hell of a lot, certainly not enough to warrant another 45 minutes of screen time.
I was heartbroken. Worse I was kind of disinterested. Sure I wanted to find out what happened but at the same time if I had turned off the DVD and never saw how it ended I wouldn't have been disappointed. (Worse the final reveal was kind of a let down, with the final image the sort of thing that wasn't called for)
Its not a bad film, it's just one that goes from being one of the best thrillers of the year to one of the most mundane in the course of the last three quarters of an hour.
Its worth seeing, it's just not a film that should be considered for an Oscar.
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