Review: Hereafter (2010)

Tags

2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, 2010, Bryce Dallas Howard, Cécile de France, Clint Eastwood, Matt Damon

Director: Clint Eastwood
Stars: Matt Damon, Cecile De France, Bryce Dallas Howard
Plot: Three people – an American blue collar worker, a French journalist and an English schoolboy – are each affected by death in different ways.

Shoehorning a fictional story around a real historical event is a very tempting idea for a scriptwriter.

James Cameron’s Titanic proves that it can be done – creating a story which can captivate a huge audience whilst conveying the main event in all its glory. Pearl Harbor and Remember Me are two examples of how this can fall very flat indeed.

Hereafter features not one but two significant world events: the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004, followed by the London 7/7 bombings just over six months later. The story jumps from one character to the next (generally Paris, San Francisco and London), without really giving us enough time to get under their skin – except for Marcus, a London schoolboy, whose tragic tale is easily the most affecting.

Matt Damon and Cecile De France play their characters well enough, but after an exhilarating opening, the plot peters out into a melancholic tone which clashes with the set up. Hereafter is decent entertainment, but after one too many European clichés, its appeal begins to wane.

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Review: In the Line of Fire (1993)

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1993, Clint Eastwood, In the Line of Fire, John Malkovich, Rene Russo, Wolfgang Petersen

Director: Wolfgang Petersen
Stars: Clint Eastwood, John Malkovich, Rene Russo Plot: When a Secret Service agent (Eastwood) who failed to protect John F. Kennedy senses the current President’s life is in danger, he vows not to make the same mistake again.

A somewhat less-than-sprightly Clint does battle with rent-a-baddie Malkovich in this relatively lightweight drama that plays out more like a TV movie than a cinematic cat-and-mouse thriller.

Eastwood’s Frank Horrigan is haunted by his inability to protect JFK from his assassin and must fight that particular demon throughout in order to stop a rogue former CIA operative carrying out his threat to kill the President. The whole feel of the film is very 1990s and now looks particularly dated, although there are fine performances from the two leads and Rene Russo, who doesn’t stretch herself but is very adept at being a fine supporting character, as ever.

There are shades of Die Hard in the finale, but Malkovich’s Mitch Leary isn’t a patch on Alan Rickman’s pantomime villain Hans Gruber – he’s played far menacing scoundrels than this, it has to be said (see Dangerous Liaisons). On the whole it’s pretty predictable, but Clint Eastwood is always worth a watch.

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