Most helpful customer reviews
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Sometimes, they come back, Dec 16 2008
"For I am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live:"
Short Attention Span Summary (SASS):
1. Ben Garvey (Paul Walker) is an ex-con who has done his crime, his time and his parole, and has just become a free man
2. He has a wife (Piper Perabo) and a daughter to support
3. He loses his job
4. Before the ink on his termination papers is dry, he proves that he's not so reformed after all
5. Big mistake - huge
6. In defiance of several books written by John Grisham, his trial and sentence are over in a jiffy
7. He dies
8. Or does he?
9. He wakes up to find that he has a job as a caretaker at a hospital, a second chance, a guardian angel (Lambert Wilson) and the shadow of Death on his shoulder.
10. Or does he?
This is a fairly good psychological thriller if you can skirt around the plot holes and stop yourself from screaming at Garvey when he fails to do things that are blatantly obvious to everyone else, or does things that are incredibly dumb.
Walker does a good job in the lead role, and Perabo deserves a medal for tolerance. Bob Gunton (Rendition, The Shawshank Redemption) is especially effective as Father Ezra, the administrator of the hospital, and Wilson shows some of his Matrix mettle even though his is a relatively small part.
A good one to rent, if only to watch Paul Walker come forth
Rated: 3.5 stars
Amanda Richards
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Remaking the Criminal Mind, Dec 4 2008
While this movie didn't score big at the box office, it portrays a very troubling and curious little story about how a future America may chose to deal with the issue of capital punishment, especially in Texas. Based on a best-selling novel by the same title, this movie deals with the life of Ben Garvey as he attempts to forsake his criminal past by getting a fresh start. After a couple of years on the road to financial and social respectability, Ben's past catches up with him and he is fired from his job as a warehouse supervisor. He quickly falls back into a life of crime that takes him straight back to prison; this time to death row in Huntsville, Texas for being implicated in a triple murder in a break-in at an industrial lab. What he doesn't know then is that when the state pretends to dispose of him through lethal injection, it is really assigning to a new fate somewhere in the backwoods of Oregon as part of a special psychological experiment in criminal rehabilitation. Garvey's life, like other inmates at this institution, have been drug altered and reprogrammed to erase all traces of the past before their staged executions. Though the first part of the film is slow because John Glenn, the director, wants to give his audience some important background on the Garvey family in their earlier lives, it picks up quite quickly when Ben appears to just wander on to the grounds of Father Ezra's sanatorium. But nothing is by chance in this film, as the viewer will quickly learn. It won't be long before Garvey gets the urge to break out and return to the loved ones of his silent past. Instincts tell him that he is being held against his will in a very sinister plot to restructure his life. What I found very compelling about this movie was that this fictional `Brave New World' project to reconstitute and reform the criminal mind is still very plausible given the history of psychological experimentation already undertaken in the US and Canada over the last century. Well worth watching to get a fresh grasp of what is meant by social engineering at the state level.
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