Say Anything Blog

Verdict: Meh.

The story and action was good, but both would have been light years better if the camera work wasn’t flippin’ terrible.  During the entire movie the shot on the screen jumps around as though the camera were being held by some amateur who is shooting with one hand and playing a video game with the other.  It was dizzying.  It gave me a headache, and ultimately it was so distracting that much of the movie was hard to follow.  There were times I had no idea what was going on because the cut-scenes were so rapid and the shot was so wobbly that I just couldn’t grasp what I was being shown.

This herky-jerky camera shot thing seems to be a fad in moving making these days, and it’s always annoying, but this movie represents the worst example of that style I’ve seen to date.

As for the story itself, it was largely and surprisingly free of the usual fare of left-wing agitprop which was surprising given the subject matter.  The writers managed to hold off until the very end when we’re told that Jamie Foxx’s character and the chief terrorist character both told love ones the same thing to calm them down after an attack: “We’re going to kill them all.”

The obvious implication here being that we’re no better than they are, despite the fact that we Americans and our allies generally fight for freedom while the terrorists generally fight for their various flavors of totalitarianism.  But that’s just par-for-the-course in the typical liberal mind, I guess.