The Disappearance of a Good Movie
Having served time Vic (Eddie Marsan) and Danny (Martin Compston) come up with a plan to get rich. The plan is to kidnap a random rich girl, Alice Creed (Gemma Arterton), and demand a ransom from her father. And all things are going to plan as Vic and Danny prepare a flat to keep Alice hostage whilst they steal a van to pull of the kidnapping. But after bringing Alice back things take a strange turn of events.
"The Disappearance of Alice Creed" starts off with a reasonably impressive scene of Danny and Vic getting everything ready for the kidnapping. The preparation of the room with a bed screwed into the floor, underlay tacked to the walls to provide sound proofing, the plastic wrapped van interior for transporting their victim, it all is nicely put together to convince us that these two have thought things through. And when we have the kidnapping it is quite shocking as we see Alice brutally stripped naked, her clothes cut from her body. In an unsettling way it borders on being a guide on kidnapping it is so effective.
But of course things can't be that simple and slowly the bigger picture starts to be revealed and all is definitely not what it seems but of course to reveal would be to spoil some of the enjoyment of the movie. The thing is that for some the twists will be clever and make the movie whilst for others the twists will end up contrived and make the movie a joke. Unfortunately I am in the second camp because the impact of the twists is too huge to be believable.
The knock on effect of "The Disappearance of Alice Creed" coming over as contrived is that the performances start to not work. You begin to look at them and think well after such a realistic and frankly powerful opening they start to fail because it becomes too contrived. It is a shame because in the case of Gemma Arterton she certainly doesn't hold back in her performance.
What this all boils down to is that "The Disappearance of Alice Creed" didn't do it for me as whilst it started well enough the contrived nature of the story ended up ruining it for me.
