Noomi Rapace Underutilized In Dead Man Down

Dead Man Down is one of those movies shot for the big screen, but could be perceived as a made-for-TV crime drama. Danish director Niels Arden Oplev, best known for his Swedish movie The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, built his career from the production of a series of TV movies. The 2009 Swedish thriller - the first in a trilogy - made such an impact internationally that it not only made Oplev famous, but also generated worldwide attention to its leading actress Noomi Rapace as well.

When comparing the Hollywood version of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo with its Swedish counterpart, the latter is definitely stronger and more impactful. But that's why, perhaps, Dead Man Down is disappointing since I expected Oplev's American theatrical debut to have a bigger 'wow' impact. It's entertaining and suspenseful if you like thrillers and action movies, but the plot is too weak to be credible. The story tries to paint revenge as the biggest priority for crime kingpins and assassins, but the attempt to add a good conscience to the underworld characters is just not convincing enough. Unlike Quentin Tarentino whose movies are very often about revenge as well, this flick lacks depth and poetry.

But the weakest link in the entire film is that Noomi Rapace's talents are very underutilized. Rapace's performance as Lisabeth Salander in the Millennium Trilogy was breathtakingly excellent and will, probably, continue to haunt audiences around the world for a long time to come. But her accolades throughout her career - from her stellar stage-performing record to her Best Actress award at Sweden's prestigious Guldbagge Awards - should lead to an ongoing expansion of her roles rather than repetitive and limiting ones. The Spanish-Swedish actress should really stop playing physically and emotionally tormented women on screen. She undertook such an insignificant and totally dispensable role as the gypsy in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. In Dead Man Down, she once again plays a physically-abused, but tough woman seeking revenge.

Along the same line, Colin Farrell's talent as an actor is also not maximized. Having seen his performance in Phone Booth, I continue to wonder why he continuously chooses action-hero roles with very few facial expressions required. I can only say that the star power of Oplev and Rapace had to be the only reason why there's a cast of renowned actors in very minor, supportive roles in this movie - Oscar-Award nominee Terrence Howard, French actress Isabelle Huppert and the always charismatic Armand Assante.

The Swedish version of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo may be more successful, but Rooney Mara has moved on beyond her Lisabeth Salender role whereas Noomi Rapace still has not.

Building A Positive Future Trumps Chilean Dictatorship

As a marketing professional, I'm particularly interested in the Spanish-language film No directed by Chilean director Pablo Larrain. Like Argo, the film is based on history, albeit an overdramatization of what happened during the 1988 plebiscite. The premise of the film is very simple - an advertising executive devised and implemented a campaign to defeat Augusto Pinochet in Chile's 1988 referendum peacefully after 15 years of dictatorship.

The film was nominated in the Best Foreign Language Film category at this year's Oscars but lost to the French movie Amour. Its simplicity drew many criticisms, but I think it's the simplicity that resulted in a nomination. The ad campaign drives home a direct message: both politics and marketing are built on dreams of the future. Pinochet's camp and its Yes marketing team didn't get that and underestimated the opposition. General Pinochet's administration further tried to suppress and intimidate the No team with oppressive moves.

The movie was filmed video-style to give an impression of a documentary-like cinema piece in the 80s. Of course, we all understand that it took more than an advertising campaign to overthrow the Pinochet autocracy, but the message of a happy and promising future free of dictatorship was too irresistible for Chileans. Yes, the ad campaign might be tacky and plagiaristic at times, but the marketing goal was ultimately achieved.

The film is successful because it's serious and funny at the same time. We see the real footage of the oppression and the intimidation. At the same time, we also see the strengths and weaknesses of what marketing can and cannot do. We also witness the power of third-party endorsement when real footage of Hollywood celebrities showed their support for the No campaign - Superman Christopher Reeve, Jane Fonda in her activist mode, and Richard Dreyfuss expressing his support on TV in Spanish. 

But the film's success is largely attributed to its lead actor, Mexican superstar Gael Garcia Bernal (The Motorcycle Diaries), who's renowned not only for his acting talent, but also for his choice of roles. Bernal expressed in fluent English in a London TV interview that politics is very much part of everyday life in Latin America, and this became the essence of the movie No. Even though he started his career as a TV soap opera heartthrob in Mexico, Bernal became the first Mexican actor to be accepted at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London at the age of 19. His acting is a combination of emotional intensity with the authenticity of an everyday hero. Bernal is a thinking woman's Romeo in Latin America - no wonder Natalie Portman dated him for several years before moving on to others and marrying ballet dancer Benjamin Millepied.

This movie is an intelligent production, but like the Academy Awards jurors, I prefer Amour even more.

A Stunning Hitchcockian Thriller

I've not seen such a masterpiece in the thriller genre for a long time - watching Stoker today was like simultaneously reading a poem and a suspense novel!

South Korean director Park Chan-Wook's first English-language film is a stunner - visually mesmerizing, sumptuous in imageries, and Hitchcockian in suspense! No wonder the film garnered a lot of attention at the recent Sundance Festival. Park is famous for stylistic violence, but with this English-language film debut, he has ascended to superstardom. Park's background is so interesting - a former philosophy student and a former film critic, he decided to try to become a filmmaker after seeing Hitchcock's Vertigo. After winning the Grand Prix at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival for his film Oldboy, he became famous for The Vengeance Trilogy. It's not surprising that director Quentin Tarentino is a huge fan of Park's.

Like Chinese-American director Ang Lee, Park used an interpreter on set even though he speaks English. But Park's accomplishment with Stoker is obviously supported by many other pleasant surprises, First and foremost, there is a total of eight producers including such famous names as Ridley and Tony Scott and Wentworth Miller, the hugely-popular leading star of the TV drama Prison Break. A Princeton graduate who majored in English Literature, Miller also debuted with his screenwriting talent in this movie, proving that he's not just a pretty face.

The cast is absolutely excellent - Mia Wasikowska (the lead actress in Jane Eyre) as the 18-year-old India Stoker; Nicole Kidman as her unhappy, self-destructive mother; and Matthew Goode (from Woody Allen's Match Point) as the ultimate creepy charmer, Charles Stoker. British composer Clint Mansell also wrote a mesmerizing score for the film.

For thrillers to be successful, they need to make the audience guess what's going to happen next. Stoker not only makes our brains work fast, it also makes us crave more - that's the creepy success of this masterpiece!