Sunday, April 19, 2009

Tell No One

This French thriller is based on Harlan Coben's novel.  Coben even has a cameo role, perhaps the beginning of a tradition for him.  In his Twittering, Coben advises people to watch the movie with subtitles because the dubbing  is like "bad Godzilla."  It's not quite that bad, and in fact I got used to it after only a couple of minutes.  (Judy hates subtitles, so we rarely use them.)

Here's the plot: a guy's wife is murdered.  Or so he thinks.  Years after her death, he gets a mysterious e-mail telling him to go to a street-cam link at a certain time.  He does, and there on camera is his wife.  (Let me say right here that Coben has already used more variations on the current photo of a person supposedly long dead than any living writer, and it seems he's just getting warmed up.  I've heard that his latest novel has yet another one.)  So anyway, the guy decides to find his wife and find out what's going on.  Complications and plot twists start to pile up.

If you've read the novel, the complications and plot twists won't surprise you, though there are some little differences toward the end.  The movie's still fun, though.  The acting's fine, and there's one change from the novel that works really well: the sadistic baddie is a woman.  (This is not revealing anything about the plot.)  There's also an extended chase scene that works pretty well, even though it adds to the length of a movie that could have benefited by losing a few minutes.  All in all, though, very entertaining.

5 comments:

pattinase (abbott) said...

I liked this a lot. Glad you did too.

Anonymous said...

I wish that we could drop the stereotype that all Godzilla movies have "bad" dubbing. Some of the later ones from the 70s do (to be fair, those might be the ones that Coben was thinking of), but most of the higher-quality Godzilla movies from the 60s are actually pretty competently dubbed.

Todd Mason said...

Sandy Frank, king of the schlock importers of Japanese among other films, has a lot to answer for in the dubbing department.

The maturity with which the film was presented was refreshing, when one considered how much of it would be handled in a US film, or at least most US films...the farfetchedness, so to write, of what goes on didn't dampen my enjoyment.

mybillcrider said...

A lot of the fun in Harlan's recent books is how far-fetched they are.

Juri said...

After watching subtitled movies for all my life I always find it hard to fathom why some people hate them.

Haven't seen the film, so cant' comment (it was in theaters here in Finland and received pretty good reviews). The novel sure is far-fetched.