When she won’t go easily and has the audacity to strike out at him, this arouses more than anger in him and his reaction, to return the blows with interest, certainly does plenty for her too. After they exchange increasingly forceful blows, they fall into bed.
Then despite Ford having the delectable Amy (Kate Hudson) as his girlfriend, they embark on an affair, a sadomasochistic affair at that. One where the Alba rear end gets a regular tanning and some more, as they switch from sex to violence and back at a moment’s notice, redefining ‘liking it rough’, as she unearths his inner psychopath.
Unfortunately some manner of the plot and particularly the occasionally mumbled dialogue makes it hard to follow at times. We gets flashbacks about what happened to him as a child but was he abused, or was he the abuser?
The pair of them team up to blackmail the business man, threatening to expose his son. Ford however double crosses her, which brings us to the real talking point of the film, when the violence turns nasty.
The scene where Alba gets beaten to pulp is probably not going to be everyone's cup of tea. Shocking? Yes. Gratuitous? Maybe. Necessary? Probably. I don’t think a Disney version would have worked.
Then there’s the way he does it, with his fists, while telling her how much he loves her. I love you, thump, I love you, thump thump. Nice. Not.
Then he shoots the business man's son and presses the gun into her hand, hoping to make the deaths appear to be a lovers' tiff or perhaps a prostitution transaction gone wrong. Yet quite how she got to land a prefect shot on him with a broken neck and only one eye... I’m not sure.
The murder pricks the attention of the District Attorney, who seems to have spotted the same glaring holes in the staged double murder. Yet he doesn’t seem to do anything about it. Meanwhile inside Ford’s twisted mind he doesn't seem to believe he`s a bad guy at all. He tries to build an alibi and to frame other people for the murders. However, when his plans don’t go quite as well as he hoped, he’s forced to commit more crimes to cover his trail, including using his boxing skills again, this time fatally on his girlfriend.
Director Michael Winterbottom tries to paint a picture of a seriously disturbed human being. Maybe, he doesn't go far enough because I don’t think he quite succeeds. It’s a fascinating but slightly meandering film that’s not helped by Affleck’s deliberately vague portrayal of Ford and the ending’s a bit weird too.
Still, I thoroughly enjoyed it but needed a stiff drink to get over it.
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