Tom Kohorst

Overall Impression: With a obvious shoe string budget this film delivers a edge of your seat thriller about a missing girl & an endless pool of suspects with some major plot holes & Characters that should have had far more development than they were afforded. Cumulative Rating: 3.90/5.0 ~ Rounded 4 Who should watch this? - Anyone who loves thrillers really. It’s worth watching and doesn’t deserve the high negativity. Review: A seemingly normal family led by no other than Mr Thomas Jane! This family is heading out on an RV trip into scenic middle of nowhere with one daughter. They arrive at the campsite it’s pretty obvious it’s a sparsely populated area with a camp manager, a maintenance kid, and a couple of other campers. Right from the gecko it flashes to a prisoner escaping from prison nearby and the TV showing breaking news of this event. Then back to how the Dad is excited to go fishing with his daughter who’s equally excited. It becomes pretty obvious early on, the couple has no love lust between them and only holding on by their uniform love for their daughter. The wife happily goes to pickup supplies and the husband prepares the fishing poles only to get distracted by the sexy neighbor wife who’s getting out of a makeshift hot tub. Right after they both meet up again in front of the RV only to realize their daughter has vanished. What ensues is Red Herring after Red Herring as the mental state of both completely spirals into various stages of psychosis & paranoia. The veneer of a perfect family and the friendly neighborhood camp decays as the movie progresses. My Thoughts: Spoilers! I really liked the constant Red herrings and what seemed like an inversion of classical thriller tropes. Every time I thought I new how it was going to play out I didn’t. It was basically the Shutter Island of Kidnap Kid movies. What I disliked were the plot holes and the entire cluelessness of the couple next to them. Half way through the film the wife was already looking like she was off her rocker but everyone just assumed it was the trauma/grief. They weren’t suspecting at all and didn’t fight back at all in their untimely death. Nor did all of these murders in total 4 ever increase the police suspicion or intensity until the very last moment. Nor did the FBI ever step in which frankly in real life would have happened. I really questioned how the grieving couple killed that camper at night then left on boat in broad daylight with said other sexy couple only to get back without them and no one saw or were suspicious of anything? Like I said before there’s a great movie with a original script in here somewhere but because of lack of character development, plot development, and unconvincing secondary character behavior it only ended up being a good/okay movie worth watching once.

I just watched Glass. Now coming into it I wasn’t a huge M. Night Shyamalan fan but overall I both liked this movie for its plot archetype and hated it to some extent for how it’s entire lack of meaningful character development. Whether you like or hate this movie will depend on what you’re mindset is when you come into to this movie. You’ll hate it if you’re emotionally invested in these characters and expect to see any deep character growth, meaningful insights, or strong plot points that leave you emotionally drawn to the movie or it’s finale. Yeah there’s none of that. It’s strictly plays out through the plot and most interactions feel like plot devices to move the plot along. You’ll like or love if you’re a George R.R. Martin fan type writing and a fan of movies where the writer uses characters as more of plot devices to tell a ultimately underwhelming but nonetheless gripping narrative that sets up for potentially new and unique movies set in the gripping world Shyamalan has built up through this trilogy. It leaves that question open. The finale in terms of characters is incredibly underwhelming and leaves most of them only vaguely memorable. As a Thriller and a plot I’d give it a B it was genuinely good in that sense. As a trilogy that’s already had two movies on its roster and this should of been the climax of its world building potential drawing them all together, yeah no there was no meaningful depth found here. Finally as a movie that leaves you contemplating introspectively and wanting to see more of this world by the end I’d say it succeeded the most in this department so it would easily get a B+ there. The journey to get there just could have been done in so many endless better constructive ways that would leave you more emotionally drawn to the characters that played out the narrative. On this note it felt like a missed opportunity and felt completely lacking. Ultimately I’d say watch it but don’t have high standards. You don’t need to see the other two movies to watch this one, they just might help when looking for easter eggs though or for slight background info.