Jamie (George) has just been in a violent car accident that was really not an accident at all. She awakes to find herself prisoner in a dirty warehouse room. She discovers that she and her young son have been kidnapped, but her captors are not looking for ransom. Her husband has been secretly working for some pretty bad dudes, and he has squirreled away 44 million dollars of the bad guys’ money. Now they want it back. Jamie is given boxes of audio recordings that were made at her home and asked to break a code her hubby was using that might help identify where the money is. The promise is that she and her son will go free if the money is recovered. Unfortunately there is a deadline. Someone named Falco (Krige) is coming soon and will kill all of them if the money is not recovered.
The film is quite claustrophobic. It pretty much all takes place in the same small room. The entire film depends too much on the performances of the two leads. Melissa George does about as much as she can with the role. Her movements and range of emotions is pretty limited. Oded Fehr plays the kidnapper who interacts the most with Jamie. For some reason he does not list the credit on his official resume. It is also not included on his IMDB profile. I’m not sure if he was unhappy with the finished result or if it is merely an oversight. He does a pretty good job here, but half the time his face is covered, giving him even less to work with than George has. There are some good tension moments, to be sure. Still, I found the film didn’t move fast enough or supply enough stimulation to keep it from getting very tedious. It was a brave choice, to be sure, but never carried off as effectively as was needed to keep the film engaging.
You’ll have a clever enough mystery to solve, but it’s not like you’re given enough pieces to really play along. The climax packs a film’s worth of action into a very short space of time. There are so many twists and turnarounds that you go from a lethargic brain to overload… and all in that same small room.
As evidenced by this “No Huddle Review” we were only given a screener of the film. That means that I can’t really comment on what the final product looks like or sounds like. Fox is so worried we’re going to go out and pirate the films that they tie our hands to give any kind of comprehensive review. Based on what I saw here, I really can’t recommend this one at all. “Some things just aren’t made for this world.”
