Elijah Wood stars as a fan who gets cheated out of a chance to meet his favorite movie star, Sasha Grey. While livestreaming her Comic Con panel, a hacker sneaks onto his laptop and offers him an opportunity to hack into her phone so he can spy on her. He stupidly agrees, and winds up getting himself into one precarious situation after the other.
Nacho (Colossal) Vigalondo’s Open Windows plays like a modern-day riff on not one but two Hitchcock classics. Like Rope, it’s seemingly done in one take and the peeping tom stuff plays a lot like Rear Window (except our hero uses a lot of newfangled computer technology instead of a simple old pair of binoculars). The movie it’s most like though is that terrible flick Unfriended as it all takes place on a computer screen.
It’s not a bad idea. There’s enough here to fill out a short film, or if done well, a seventy-five-minute movie. At a hundred minutes though, it runs out of steam way before it crosses the finish line.
The film especially gets tiresome once Wood leaves the confines of his hotel room. At least those early scenes had a sense of claustrophobia about them. Things really start to unravel once more and more people start popping onto Woods’ screen, offering him guidance, or possibly trying to trick him. The constant zooming in and out from window to window quickly gets annoying too.
Once it becomes a chase movie, the movie really starts to become implausible. The protracted finale also helps to further test the audience’s patience. The string of plot twists that punctuate the third act would be laughable if it all weren’t so damned ludicrous.
Much of the suspense comes from Wood being so gullible and allowing a stranger complete access to his computer. I guess that’s the film’s biggest lesson: Sometimes, when you’re on the internet, and all you want to do is see Sasha Grey naked, you wind up getting hacked and end up with a bunch of unwanted spyware on your computer. Hey, we’ve all been there before.
AKA: Black Hacker.
No comments:
Post a Comment