linescraig

Excellent film in the Peter Greenaway style (though not quite as subtle). The seemingly simple story is intriguing, very well written and acted with feeling, pathos and bathos. The film as a whole benefits from superb costume design, natural lighting, and great use of super wide lenses, an excellent musical score and cool sound design. It's modern yet authentically period, funny and quirky but tragic and serious. This quiet masterpiece is not everyone's cup of tea of course, americans will have bother comprehending history that happened before the 'founding' and it is unashamedly British - none more so than the thankfully correct spelling of the title.

As many other reviewers have commented, the original version (1973 - when some classic films were made) is almost flawless because it has the atmosphere, peril and drama of Charriere's real-life experiences. This unnecessary remake suffers from the same issues that spoil many 'present day' films; too many Producers who know zero about script writing. Script Writers who know zero about drama. Directors who put the 'photography' above the content, when in reality 99 percent of viewers don't give a flying fox about lighting and grading, and Actors whose egos far outweigh their talent. Papillon, the book, is a true masterpiece for so many reasons and it's almost a natural screenplay - what the Producers, Writers and Director have done here is managed to sum up the book like a Twitter Post rather than a script, missing out on the absolutely wonderful, scary, heartfelt and funny scenarios that Charriere went through for real. The film was also shot in Malta, presumably for the South American scenes, and probably in Winter because there are many scenes where it's clearly cold enough to see the breath of the actors. I mean, if you are going to spend a lot of money on a film, at least go somewhere more authentic and save your money elsewhere. So, forget about this attempt, it's insulting to the memory of Charriere. First, read the book, then check out the '73 version with McQueen and Hoffman. This poor attempt is not so much a butterfly, more like a moth.

Everyone likes Denzel and I'm sure he's just as nice in real life as all of the characters he plays. No exception here. It's a good film - there's a lot of characters, maybe too many to focus on, and that's the real issue - the central plot is lost; it's set up vaguely at the start and then disappears altogether becoming simply a tale of revenge in the 3rd act. Overall, this film needed a more ruthless script editor and it needed to concentrate on the essence of the concept of 'The Equalizer' - helping those who no-one else could or would help. Just too many storylines without real resolution. The other problem is that it's too damn dark - not the story - the lighting and grading. I wonder if it's because editors edit on computer monitors and don't check their edits projected onto a screen. I was squinting trying to see details in the film. The 'lighting' is nice, and the mainly CGI'd and special effected 3rd act is very well done, but the overall grade is dim. Additionally, and this is not confined to this film, the 7.1 soundtrack is excellent BUT for goodness sake mixing engineers, please turn up the volume of the central dialogue track - the SFX overwhelm it.