Se7en
The New York
Times inexplicably got this right
in its review. Chance evolution, probably.
This suite
of amusements is a first-rate nightmare in the Twilight Zone vein, by
which I mean that even given an opulently expansive treatment at full-length,
it adheres to its driving sense of image first and foremost, and lets the chips
fly. This is a very secure way to make a movie, “a succession of images.”
Gordon Douglas
left a daredevil for dead south of the border in Viva Knievel!, but this
is all a game, the one played by artists who render a turgid semblance into a
pellucid reality, or something like that.
The bravura of
this nightmare chain ends with a virtuosic leap and then is dispelled with some
care in well-prepared echoes of Vertigo and Blowup. TV Guide was
never sure if there really was a body in Antonioni’s film, now wonders “what
all the fuss was about,” and claims the Cortázar story it’s based on is “Final
del Juego”...
At least one of
the reviewers made glancing reference to A Christmas Carol, of which
this is a finely-modulated variant.
Panic Room
The whole thing
pivots on the security man turned thief, to begin with. And then, the burlesque
shifts from besieged mother and daughter to thieves beset by angry mother. The
nicety of the conclusion, with its air of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,
is the laying not up where moth and rust, etc.
The nice
transformations of Wait Until Dark include the little girl as diabetic
requiring injections and most zealously admiring the title chamber, “definitely
my room”.
None of this
particularly interested the critics, who nevertheless like a pretty good show
as much as the next man, for no particular reason at all.