Source Code / Henry's Crime

I twinned up on a double dose of Vera Farmiga here, who shot to stardom in my Best Actress Hall of Fame when she played Teresa Gazelle (Running Scared, 2006) and assassinated a female paedophile by blasting her from close range with 3 bullets, one in each boob and one in the head! The best bitch-on-bitch slaying by far! I’ve not seen her in anything bad, to be honest, much like the English actor Christopher Eccleston.

HENRY’S CRIME (2010) features Keanu ‘wooden’ Reeves at his most stiffest and concrete, as if a smile would crack his face, along with Farmiga and the catalyst, James Caan. This cast I simply had to see. The result was me smiling fondly along for much of the movie, mostly because of just how bad Keanu is when he’s not up and down on those cables in The Matrix, and by bad I mean good, but in a bad way. He has perfected that dumb, vacant look, and Caan, who, to me, will always be the poor Paul Sheldon in Misery (1990), who perfected how to smile and look pleased while simultaneously fearing for his life, still pulls off those hilarious expressions. At one point Keanu arranges to pick him up from jail but then turns up without a car, suggesting the bus station, and Caan stares at him with as much disbelief as he does when Kathy Bates, as the deranged Annie Wilkes, decides to hobble him with an axe.

SOURCE CODE (2011) is a scorcher. Take it from me and listen to what I'm telling you. A scorcher. It’s all good. There doesn’t seem to be a beginning, middle or end, just a chunk of movie more or less all the same. Slammin’ viewing. Never seen anything that had me so engaged from the first shot when Jake Gyllenhaal appears on a train not knowing who he is (we’ve all been there eh?). It’s what I call a ‘situation’ movie, because it’s all about a character being caught in a situation. They have a different ‘arc’ than traditional movies. There’s no waiting around with them. Think Groundhog Day, with action, on steroids, and you’re in the ballpark. Was much better than expected. Mainly because of the fact that it was set on a moving train. The premise asks a little much, but if you can grasp the philosophical ‘brain in a jar’ argument, then no amount of sci-fi Hollywood storylines will ever throw you off. You know the one, that life is a computer simulation and all that.

If you are ever confused, just tell yourself that his brain is in a jar somewhere. It works with anything. I was lost within the very first 5 minutes of Inception, and with 142 minutes of running time left, it was either Di Caprio's brain in a jar or my head up my arse.