In Review: The Impossible

Directed By: Juan Antonio Bayona
Stars: Naomi Watts, Ewan McGregor

What I Liked
Heavyweight performances from Watts and McGregor. Ultra-realistic depiction of the tsunami. Harrowing depiction of the tsunami, meticulously detailed and executed. Great mother and son chemistry between Tom Holland and Watts.

What I Disliked
Harrowing narration with tiny emotional rewards. The needless insistence that the film is based on a true story. Forced casting of Watts and McGregor, remaking the story to be about a British family instead of Spanish.

Gist
It's an emotionally taxing film with great investment from its cast and its director, but as the emotional dividends pay off, you feel a little too drained to realize the payouts.

Maria and Henry Bennett (Watts and McGregor, Maria and Enrique Belon in real life--Spanish) with their kids Lucas, Thomas, and Simon decide to spend Christmas vacation in Thailand. While on vacation, the Indian Ocean Tsunami of 2004 hit, separating the family and greatly injuring Maria. The film chronicles in great detail their survival of the tsunami as well as their eventual (and seemingly magical) reunion.

In 2004, a devastating tsunami hits Thailand and other countries in the Indian Ocean, claiming thousands of lives. The Impossible details the accounts of the Belon family, masked as the Bennetts, as they survive the tsunami and piece their family together through happenstance and good fortune.

The Belon family with Watts and McGregor

Bayona developed the movie with intensive participation from Maria Belon (who is credited in the movie, "Story By Maria Belon") to keep things as real as possible. Watts was cast as Maria Bennett, with Belon saying that she loved Watts in Inarritu's 21 Grams. To remedy this casting problem (instead of actually turning Watts to look Spanish), they simply made everyone British. The Belons became The Bennetts Enrique Belon was renamed Henry, while their sons Lucas and Simon kept their names (or the spellings at least as Spanish names are accented differently), while Tomas was Anglicized to Thomas. Oddly, Maria was not chastised into becoming Mary, perhaps because Maria wanted to keep her name out of vanity, but whatever.

Maria Belon with son Lucas Belon at the premiere of The Impossible,
8 years after the tragedy in Thailand

As with most true stories, we can count on directors to take dramatic liberties. Moviemaking has so many factors--how the producers and financial backers think it should sell, how the actors want to treat their characters, how the screenplay writers want to create cinematic affectation--that the final product may bear little resemblance to real life events--and sometimes for the better. In real life, Maria Belon loses half of her right leg, while in the movie, Maria keeps it (at least until the film ends) amidst becoming death.

My problem with The Impossible is how it managed to echo a fraction of The Passion of The Christ for Maria Bennett. It was a practice of stressful coincidences--owing perhaps to how graphic (and real, possibly even accurate) Bayona chose to portray the tsunami incident, with its fortunate events bordering soap opera territories that seems diluted in all that tsunami water. Was it bad? Far from it, but it is stressful to watch--it actually felt like experiencing the tsunami first hand that I'd say it is a movie experience that would mark on you and assure your distancing from the beach for the foreseeable future. Had Maria Bennett lost her leg, it would have been the nail to the coffin and cinemas might flood with tears--causing mass casualties. At least the family reunites and The Bennetts survive. Happiness! But for some reason, this joyful coincidence just couldn't compensate for the amount of stress I harbored over the 105 minutes running time. Of course, we wouldn't know for sure how much of all these is real, except that it felt real

Bayona depicts a tsunami event so graphically real, it's scarring.

Kudos to the cast. Watts and Holland portray believable mother and daughter, while McGregor, Watts, and Holland all have convincing and powerful performances that court tears.

The direction was grueling and meticulously detailed and the acting was powerful, but I don't know, maybe it would have been wiser for them to have allowed more happy scenes--or at least let us in on what kept Maria Bennett going, or arrange the eventual reunion in a less soapy manner and eventually depict Maria losing her leg: yeah, we can handle it the way we did with How to Train Your Dragon though that one did have its enchanting and happy moments. It's an emotionally taxing film with great investment from its cast and its director, but as the emotional dividends pay off, you feel a little too drained to realize the payouts. Not something you'd love to watch on a lonely day.

Judgment: Probably it was a bad idea to watch it with an overcast mood and a penchant for heading the beach this summer. I may have been expecting for Bayona to Hollywood-ize this film a bit more, make it more jovial and celebrating, but it ended feeling like Hostel with water. But maybe if he had, I'd call it sappy and cheesy. So maybe it's all for the good. They could've really just made Naomi and Ewan look more Spanish though, I mean come on, how hard is that? 3.6 out of 5 stars

For this movie, I'm willing to pay, 170 to 190 pesos. I paid 191 pesos. And Eastwood Cinemas decided to show me a grainy version with Thai subs. What a rip-off, Megaworld!

In Review: Haywire

The Gist

Neatly done, tense, and well-directed, Haywire works in spots and keeps it going until you figure out the whole scheme of things; unfortunately, it leaves a few spots unchecked with gaping empty spaces and the large lack of emotional range makes for a somewhat shallow experience.

The Good

• succeeds largely at being a tense thriller
• action sequences are well-done, makes complete use of Carano's fighting prowess

The Bad

• Carano's emotional range rival that of a teaspoon
• largely unemotional script, unemotional characters that don't evoke your empathy

Synopsis

Mallory Kane (Carano) works as an agent for a private contractor working for the government operated by her ex-boyfriend Kenneth (Mc Gregor). After her last mission in Barcelona contracted by Rodrigo and Coblenz (Banderas and Douglas), Kane plans to retire, which Kenneth accepts, asking one last mission from her, a paid vacation of sorts to pose as the wife British agent Paul (Fassbender) who's meeting crimelord Studer to get further intel on his operations. As the night progresses, Kane discovers something that leads to events going haywire.

Carano, the film's main star, is not an actress, but an MMA fighter.

Why so Serious?

Soderbergh apparently saw Carano battle it out at the Octagon and thought of making a movie centered on her hand to hand combat skills. The result is Haywire, and as expected, Carano as a seasoned fighter and her own stuntwoman is excellent. But as an actress, the depth of emotions she displays on this film is questionable. The camera loves her, and Soderbergh focused on that and avoided placing any scene that would require much acting effort from Carano. In doing so, the movie felt dry and shallow towards the end.

1, 2, Punch

Carano delivers punch per punch as I said above. The fight scenes were cool and believable, and unlike big budgeted thrillers that contain one explosion after another and one car chase scene at least for good measure, Haywire is more of a Jason Bourne movie where the action scenes are stripped down to hand to hand combat.

Most of the tension in the movie comes from the fact that people want to kill Mallory Kane and that every step she takes, they were able to track her and that they beat her up real bad when they get to her. Eventually this ploy loses its effectiveness that at the end, it kind of becomes dull that when Soderbergh tries to pull it off again, it goes flimsy and pointless.

A lot of the problem of with Haywire comes from the fact that Soderbergh failed to make Carano "act" the way an actress would. And while she is not expected to do such, the movie suffers from this fault. Eventually, everyone in the movie ended with 3 emotions: angry, serious, or in pain dying, because if they showed anything more, it would greatly upstage Carano. Another fault was that the characters were poorly developed. Aaron (Tatum) dies and we feel no empathy. As far as Soderbergh suggests, he and Kane only had a one-night stand, yet Soderbergh thought it would be necessary to play a flashback of them kissing to emphasize Kane's sadness from Aaron's passing. Sadly, Soderbergh could've built on this to make this more evocative. But he hasn't and chose to point that out anyways.

Other than those, Haywire is thrilling and would work most of the times. Just don't expect great depths.

My verdict:

A thriller made lame by a surprising lack of emotional range, Haywire works best when it features its fight scenes. A passing mark of 3.5/5.