Review of Open Windows (2014) by Ron R — 26 Jun 2016

I don't know what to make of this movie, since I am quite a fan Nacho Vigalondo and the fact that he has a good eye for creating genre films. And, admittedly speaking, this movie is quite ambitious.

It has some good ideas on the nature of celebrity and some fans' obsessions with their favorite celebs and how that obsession manifests itself in unhealthy ways. That's what this film is about essentially.

Of course, the way they get there is really where the faults lie. Nick, Elijah Wood, is a big fan of Jill Goddard, Sasha Grey, an actress. Nick wins a contest where he would get to have dinner with Jill.

While he's waiting at the hotel, a hacker, or something, contacts him and informs him that the date has been cancelled by Jill. Then this hacker manages to get Nick to do everything he wants him to do.

This includes tying up Jill's agent in his room, using said agent in order to get Jill to strip on webcam. There comes a point in the film where the hacker kidnaps Jill. Nick, enlisting the help of another group of hackers, tries to help Jill escape from her situation.

Everything until this point is, actually, pretty good. It didn't offer anything great, but it was a fairly solid cat-and-mouse thriller. Then everything goes straight to shit. Perhaps that's a strong phrase to use, but the film does become very highly convoluted and preposterous.

Not that preposterous is bad or anything, of course, anything can work if you have a strong script. And Nacho Vigalondo had a lot of ideas about the obsession with celebrities and I felt that the movie should've just stuck with that.

But, unfortunately, there's another hacker involved in the proceedings that was believed to have been murdered by the villain, but he actually survived. Pretty sure you can figure out what the twist is going to be if you've seen more than five films.

This is where the film really lost me. It's not that it doesn't make sense, it's just that the way it is written and elaborated on leaves a lot to be desired. It's all over the place and it doesn't really manage to make all its plot elements click into one coherent whole.

The tech stuff also looks corny. Remember how Hackers, the film, made hacking look cool as shit but it actually had nothing to do with reality, that's how this film makes hacking and the tech they have look like.

It's not as 'cool' as it was in Hackers, but the principles are the same, it's not based on reality. So, to me, that was actually one of the lamest parts of the movie. The acting is decent.

Elijah Wood is good, but Sasha Grey didn't do a lot for me. I guess that, for a former adult actress, she's better than average, but she's clearly not a good actress by regular standards. Maybe I'm being a bit harsh, she'll do fine in genre films like this, but she's not gonna set the world on fire in films where she actually has to rely on her acting talents to carry a film.

I really disliked the third act of the film, it just undid everything. Like I said, everything prior to the reveal there was another actual hacker that was murdered, was good. The cat-and-mouse chase of Nick trying to get to where the villain is in order to save Jill is all good.

Everything at the hotel, prior to Nick getting in his car and leaving was also good. The third act was just a mess. And it's not even a hot mess like Age of Ultron was. It's just a mess that really ends up hurting the flick.

I was gonna give this 2.5 stars, but it's really a 2-star affair. Nacho Vigalondo had some interesting ideas and he does get to showcase that, but all that goodwill is destroyed with a nonsensical and, quite frankly, annoying third act.

I can't recommend this. It's on Netflix and you could do worse, but you'll probably come out of it really disappointed.