Thursday, January 13, 2011

Short Review of Ordinary Decent Criminal

One of the pitfalls of using Netflix as opposed to the library or Blockbuster is that it makes you a completist. Now you don't go and pick out one movie that you want to see. You add all of a certain actor or director's movies to your queue. Sometimes it pays off. You end up seeing an Altman movie like A Wedding, which you would never go to the rental place and pick out, and it turns out to be a beautiful, funny, moving piece.

On the other hand, sometimes you go on a Kevin Spacey spree, then a year later, a movie like Ordinary Decent Criminal shows up in your mailbox, and you feel obligated to watch it because it's there, and because you can't get that Everest documentary you've been waiting for until you ship back the Kevin Spacey movie you didn't really want to see.

And the movie turns out to be one of those lifeless late-nineties thrillers with a lame twist at the end and a bunch of American actors using fake Irish accents while underusing the actual Irish talent (Colin Farrell) that could have maybe made for an interesting movie.

And you want to write some kind of meaningful something about it to justify the time you wasted on it, but nothing really comes to mind except that this came out the same year as American Beauty, and it's a good thing for Kevin Spacey that we remembered that one and forgot about Ordinary Decent Criminal. Think how many fewer Kevin Spacey fans would be out there if the opposite were true.

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