Gregory Hoblit
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Connections, in both directions
It's yet another of the dual type roles Norton's beginning to specialize in, from the one that broke him out in "Primal Fear" to the more literal double role he takes on in "Leaves of Grass."
Edward Norton shined in début dual-personality as his Primal Fear altar boy conned egocentric lawyer Richard Gere, and he reprises the put-on practice now on corrections parole officer Robert De Niro.
Gerald “Stone” Creeson (Edward Norton, splitting the difference of his “Primal Fear” personas) pleads that he’s been rehabilitated to his parole officer Jack (Robert De Niro), who can’t tell whether or not Stone is playing him.
De Niro looks pained to be here, and Norton performed this jittery liar routine so indelibly in Primal Fear that nothing his character does is surprising.
This prolonged battle of wits between the titular character (Edward Norton), an arsonist who is up for release after serving time for a horrific crime, and Jack Mabry (Robert De Niro), the parole officer who will decide the prisoner's fate, is a lot more ambitious than the crafty-felon thriller Primal Fear, the movie that made Norton an instant star.
Norton’s turn as the titular prison conman Gerald “Stone” Creeson is equally fraught with memories, right back to his 1996 breakout role as the deceptively meek altar boy of Primal Fear.
From the looks of it, director Jacob Estes is deploying inspiration from Gregory Hoblit’s Frequency , a movie that uses the conception of time travel to layout an unforeseen situation where a man in 1999 is able to communicate to his father in 1969, even though his father died when the man was only 6-years-old.
Jacob Aaron Estes’ new movie Relive feels like that show mixed with Frequency, the Dennis Quaid/Jim Caviezel movie in which father and son communicate across time.
You’re probably going to read other reviews that make comparisons of Don’t Let Go with Frequency (2000) and See You Yesterday (2019, currently streaming on Netflix) which I won’t make because I never saw either one of them.
Think the Dennis Quaid-starring Frequency meets Christopher Nolan’s Memento .
As thus with shades of the Dennis Quaid and Jim Caviezel talk across time flick "Frequency," the filmmaker opts for the confluence of intersecting timelines.
This is remarkably similar to the plot of Gregory Hoblit’s 2000 supernatural thriller Frequency , although that movie was rated a family friendly PG-13 and this one is a clear R both for its bloodiness (including way too many shots of dead dogs) and for its language (if you want to see the girl from A Wrinkle in Time call someone a “stupid motherfucker,” here’s your chance).
Norton's double-play, borrowed from his Oscar-nominated role in Primal Fear, gives him a chance to show his chops among the more seasoned veterans.
Sure, he too has done better work, sometimes with similar characters: he's switched between different personalities in both "Primal Fear" (which got him an Oscar nod) and "Fight Club" (which should have earned him another), and the arrogance of his Jack here somehow reminds of his Worm in "Rounders".
(As in Primal Fear, and sort of in Fight Club , he's playing two personalities within the same body.)
The film gets away with this amusingly tasteless stunt only because Norton, in a variation on his debut in ''Primal Fear,'' does it with such skilled gusto; he makes it seem not a gimmick but a virtuoso ruse.
Norton gets the flashiest parts, reminiscent of his schizoid Primal Fear role (perhaps aided by Oz agreeing to let him write some of his own scenes), since he plays the impatient, smart, young punk looking to make his mark within the inner sanctum of world-class heist artists.
Plaza's character is not a hallucination, and Parker borrows elements from “Frequency” (2000), but instead of a HAM radio, cell phones connect them.
Saw , FeardotCom, and of course, Se7en are all part of the derivative film's lineage, which involves an agent (Diane Lane's Jennifer Marsh) with the FBI's Cyber Crimes division tasked with tracking down a fiend who straps people up to elaborate death machines and streams video of them dying on www.killwithme.com…
Combining the subspecies subplot of the psychopath who fattens on publicity, embracing many Jack the Ripper clones, with at least equal time for that of the Dirty Harry cop or Se7en uneasy buddy cops in their plodding methods, the Gregory Hoblit movie wears its long lineage on its sleeve.
That's the one place where the movie doesn't try to copy what's gone before, as it could have livened things up if it were more interesting visually, as David Fincher did with "Se7en."
Untraceable strives to gussy up its narrative cheat sheet (stolen from the still-warm bodies of Saw, Se7en, and Feardotcom, among others) with an outraged tone, but the blatant, transparent hypocrisy inherent in the story is what's really annoying.
But as with “modern” mentions of Pepsi Free and a DeLorean in “Back to the Future,” these have aged into charmingly dated details of an innovative time-crossing thriller blending “Future’s” rush with “Backdraft’s” firefighting and a dash of “Zodiac.”
Neither man ever travels bodily from one era to another, thus eliminating the need to concoct some dubious deus ex time-machina like, say, the time-warping DeLorean hot rod of "Back to the Future."
There are a lot of "Back to the Future" moments - photographs with family members appearing and disappearing - and a healthy dose of "It's a Wonderful Life" moments as well - with family members either dying or being reunited after death in another timeline.
Frequency alternates between gripping and sentimental, suspenseful and clever, with disarming ease; the time-travel gimmick works because of its novelty, and because none of the characters can control it the way they would, say, the DeLorean in Back to the Future.
Of course, as anyone who has seen the Back to the Future movies could tell you, meddling with the past is bound to complicate things, and although you don’t need a degree in chaos theory to follow the rest of the story, it wouldn’t hurt.
Effective, too, are knowing touches reminiscent of the "Back to the Future" movies.
(I was reminded of Edward Norton’s breakthrough role in Primal Fear, another B-movie elevated by an A+ split-personality performance.)
Though the storyline might sound a little familiar (the plot feels akin to 2008’s Untraceable and 2016’s Nerve ), writer/director Toby Meakins and writers Simon Allen and Matthew James Wilkinson walk the story down a more supernatural path than other voyeuristic manipulation horrors, which results in a surprisingly original movie that manages to shock, distress and entertain.
In some ways, Side Effects reminded me of Primal Fear, the Richard Gere/Edward Norton thriller, although this one is smarter and more low-key.
The unseen adversary behind these infiltration attempts appears to be using a form of bodily inhabitation (think Denzel Washington’s 1998 flick Fallen) as the proverbial puppet strings of choice…
The villain’s powers function similarly to a demon in “Fallen” (1998)…
The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
Directed by Jonathan Demme
influenced Untraceable (2008), Fracture (2007), Fallen (1998)
Characters Themes
By contrast, the performance by Hopkins as Lecter in “The Silence of the Lambs” only consisted of 16 minutes of screen time.
This tasty sequence is the first but not the only sign of the movie's above-average intelligence - there's some choice dialogue, much of it centered on the arc of Gosling's character, a brainy yokel who makes it in the big city by being smart and underestimated (the way Hopkins dresses him down and manipulates him is a lot like Lecter's interplay with Clarice Starling in "The Silence of the Lambs").
After all, the veteran actor won his Oscar 15 years ago for a similar role in "The Silence of the Lambs" the charming psychopath Hannibal Lecter (a character he also reprised in two sequels).
When an actor becomes so imperial in evil authority as Anthony Hopkins in “The Silence of the Lambs,” that can distort his career.
Hopkins and Gosling are two of the best actors of their respective generations, and if "Fracture" had concentrated on the crime-solving and battle of wits, it would have deserved some of the inevitable comparisons with "The Silence of the Lambs."
In fact, it stirred fright in me like "The Silence Of The Lambs" did seven years ago.
Even if “The Adam Project” is a pre-packaged pastiche of 2000’s “Frequency” with an Amblin-esque thumbprint, director Shawn Levy (2021's "Free Guy") and writers Jonathan Tropper and T.S. Nowlin & Jennifer Flackett & Mark Levin clearly have a lot of affection for their humor-laced, family-centered sci-fi adventure brethren.
The Adam Project is aimed at audiences who are genre diehards or too young to young to come to appreciate Back to the Future, Terminator, or Frequency.
The Lincoln Lawyer (2011)
Directed by Brad Furman
influenced by Primal Fear (1996), Fracture (2007)
Plot Themes
Gary Lucchesi produced "Primal Fear" early in his career, and one can see what drew him to John Romano's (“Intolerable Cruelty”) adaptation of the Michael Connelly novel with its similar plot about the client who acts like innocence personified before revealing the depths of depravity.
(It even shares a producer with one of the last gems of the genre, “Primal Fear.”)
Of course, you don’t go to a movie like The Lincoln Lawyer expecting a directorial master class, but a hatchet job like this does make one long for the solid, unfussy craftsmanship of a competent journeyman like Gregory Hoblit, whose Primal Fear and Fracture remain the recent high-water marks for this brand of courtroom potboiler.
We’ve seen The Lincoln Lawyer before—a little bit Primal Fear, a little bit A Time to Kill.
Fans of well-regarded gavel-pounders like Jagged Edge and Primal Fear will probably find a smoothly good ride from The Lincoln Lawyer.
It joins 2007’s “Fracture” as recent thrillers that are actually exciting to watch.
Un campo abonado anteriormente por cintas tan ingeniosas como Fallen (Gregory Hoblit, 1998) e It Follows (David Robert Mitchell, 2014).
The final showdown is the kind of preposterous Hollywood cliche that would be right at home in Robert Altman's classic satire "The Player."
It simply doesn’t make a lick of sense and should be filed under “muddled story-telling” instead; the same as the 2000 movie Frequency (starring Dennis Quaid and Jim Caviezel) about a son who receives radio transmissions from his dead dad from in the past, with which it shares several plot elements and illogicalities.
This is nearly identical to the same effect used in Frequency, including a clouding of memories when things change, with the notable exception that the affected characters exist at the same point in time.
Mirage is not afraid to wear its influences on its sleeve, most notably Gregory Hoblit’s 2000 Dennis Quaid starrer Frequency and (of course) Back to the Future .
In 1995, when Sandra Bullock appeared in "The Net," the World Wide Web was new enough that audiences could be creeped out by the film's techno-paranoia.
But it’s a special triumph for Sarah Snook, a little-known Australian actress whose turn should do for her career what Edward Norton’s curiously similar one in “Primal Fear” did for his.
Ryan Gosling plays hotshot assistant district attorney Willy Beachum, whose poker buddies must be Tom Cruise in "The Firm" and Keanu Reeves in "The Devil's Advocate."