I've seen everything I want to see at my favourite cinemas (Clapham Picture House, Curzon Soho and Apollo Piccadilly) so had to cast my net wider and ended up at the Odeon Covent Garden watching The Disappearance of Alice Creed.
It was an appropriate setting to see a film in which the central character spends much of the film bound and gagged to a bed in a grotty flat. I say appropriate because I'd forgotten quite how grotty the OCG is complete with its torn, mismatched seats and damp smell.
Anyway, I'm digressing, the film is a kidnap saga. Alice, played by Gemma Arterton, whom I loved in Tess of the D'Urbervilles on the telly, is the estranged daughter of a rich father and the victim in a long-planned kidnap plot.
*Plot spoilers alert* All goes as planned until Alice persuades Danny, one of the two ex-con kidnappers (Martin Compston) to turn his back on her while she goes to the loo over a bucket and then hits him with it. Turns out that Danny knows Alice and they had some sort of relationship.
Danny negotiates with Alice that if she plays along, he'll double cross Vic (Eddie Marsan, who does his snarl-mouthed and spitting rage to good effect) and they can share the money.
Up until this point I had been quite enjoying it. The kidnap is well done maximising the sheer terror and humiliation felt by the victim and brilliantly played out by Arterton. The connection twist presented an interesting conundrum - would Alice go along with it or expose Danny and risk her own life?
But then it not only drifts onto the bumpy bit at the side of the road like a tired driver but heads off down the embankment towards the ditch. There is a further bit of plot development in that it turns out that Vic and Danny are (the most unconvincing) gay lovers. I actually laughed out loud.
It all gets a bit silly after that as there is more double and triple-crossing mixed in with the sort of gritty violence that should be at least mildly shocking if the film hadn't already destroyed its own carefully crafted atmosphere.
I have several problems with The Disappearance of Alice Creed. Firstly it should be quite a tense thriller and sets out as such with its low budget production worked to full effect but any atmosphere is quickly lost as the plot fish tails out of control. The very carefully planned and executed kidnap seems to be easily tripped up by a series of silly mistakes. And one smaller plot point, which irked me more than it probably should, is how easily the ransom is come by with little explanation.
Considering there are only three characters in the film and it is very much about them and their inter-relationships, there are too many holes in their back stories to make it believable.
Overall it was wholly unsatisfying as a thriller let down by the plot rather than anything else.
That's just my view, what did others think?
The Guardian liked it: "A terrifically enjoyable British film from debut writer-director J Blakeson, who on the tightest of budgets delivers a professionally honed thriller, melodramatic maybe, but socked over with cracking energy."
The Telegraph was so-so: "First-time feature director J Blakeson had a writing credit on The
Descent:
Part II, but it’s his screenplay that lets him down here, not so much
for
the two switcheroo twists in the middle as the try-hard dialogue quirk
of
repeating everything twice during key exchanges (“Just me and you.
Just me
and you”).
And Jeremiah and Jeff over on Culture Blues thought it was solid but flawed: There’s nothing remarkable about it, but there’s something beautiful about simplicity, and a modest success is better than a spectacular failure (most of the time).
And here is the trailer:
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