Review of The Gift (2015) by Derek W — 11 Nov 2015

Movie Review.

The gift.

Quickie review: Great acting, great cinematography, good story, great moral/theme, but some poor common sense choices from characters, as well as a lack of character development from one person, but overall a fun physiological thrill ride.

In more detail (spoilers):

For someone who does background checks on several people throughout his adult life, and ruins other peoples lives to get ahead in this own career, you'd think he'd do a better job at protecting his wife, securing his house, and doing a triple background check on the antagonist. All he really did was make some unhanded valid treats to the antagonist, Bateman ran away from every question, and yelled rude comments from a far or over this computer. Once the truth comes out to what he did, he doesn't do anything to change himself for the better. But it was a revenge story, and the "antagonist" won. And I am glad to see a story about a high school bully getting knocked down a peg or two, but when have you gone too far...? The great thing about this movie is that you can argue if Bateman was really the protagonist or antagonist throughout this whole story. Did he really deserve the punishment, or is the "nerd" now the same (or worse) as the "bully". Is revenge really the answer?

The women was a one dimensional character and I really wanted her to do something. How is she one sided:

- she has a history of meds that the movie doesn't go into, nothing changes with her character there. The wanted us to think the meds were causing her stress instead of the psyhco outside. Kind of a lame idea and a cop out in my opinion. I'm not a fan of characters not thinking for themselves.

- she could have gone out and changed her outlook on living, instead of staying inside all the time. Her husband wanted her to stay home, true, but this is how she could of unflattened her character by going against his word and standing up for herself.

- I never got the sense of her wanting to change, she wanted answers but then never did anything after she got those answers. She confronted her husband, but then never left, did what he said, had a baby and moved on with life pretending to be happy.

The antagonist was fun and well thought out. I like psychological "killers" stories, because I'm tired of the "revenge-kill-kill" movies, too predictable, over done, etc. It was interesting to see each new gift arrive at the door, and how the family reacted to each.

The acting was fantastic, and it was fun to see Bateman as this high schooler bully/adult jerk character, I thought he played it great.

Rating:

Story - fun, thrilling: *.

Look of the film/cine - the look of the film was clean and beautiful: *.

Acting/character - acting great but some characters didn't do it for me, and some simple questions were never answered/common sense was poor: 1/2*.

Recommend - yes, to the right person, but not for everyone, only for people who like psyhco thrillers: 1/2*.

Buy/watch again - no: no star.

3/5 *s.