First let me say that I adore Stephanie Zaccharek's reviews. It's the perfect critic-reader relationship: If she likes a movie, I usually will too, and for the same reasons. This is true whether I read the review before seeing the movie or the other way around. Often after seeing a film I check the IMDB and click on the external reviews link, and more often than not- in fact virtually every time, Zacharek's take on the film was very close to what mine had been.

Ahem.

Well, to every rule there are exceptions I guess, and boy oh boy is this one of them. My friends in France, where I live most of the time, see Luc Besson as a joke. For very, very good reasons.

Maybe it's a sort of reverse Jerry Lewis thing, who knows.

Liam Neeson is sort of like Stephanie for me: A truly terrific talent who was simply awful in this case. Actually, he did as well as he could, it was just such a horrifically bad, cliche-ridden, improbable, ridiculously contrived string of nonsense.

Let's hire an Albanian translator to show up in the middle of the night and sit in my car because I just before that got roughed up by an Albanian pimp who didn't hurt me but only demanded money, as I planned you see, so that I could plant a bug on him so that by the most astounding coincidence he would, in the next few seconds after leaving me, have a conversation that included mentioning the whereabouts of my daughter who'd been kidnapped a few days before. And the Albanian could translate, you see.

Yeah, that's the ticket.

I do think it must be cultural, I mean imagine someone stringing together an equivalent series of cliches, racist stereotypes, sexist stereotypes, about some American city, punctuated by meaningless violence that's all somehow excused because everyone who gets wasted is just some low-life immigrant. That's okay though, because we're also shown gratuitous shots of former high school beauty queen types dead from forced overdoses--- and on and on. You can imagine the rest.

One thing is certain if such a film were made: Stephanie Zacharek wouldn't even review it, let alone start heaping giggly praise on it like this.

I'll continue to read and enjoy Stephanie's work and use it as an oh so useful guide to what I might like to see, but in this particular case I prefer the review that another commenter put above, and I quote:

"blech."

That, in this case, says it perfectly.

Or rather just seconding the advice you got from Berk Breathed, but with additional reasons: The general atmosphere of Salon letters is one of the worst around, in terms of people being generally nasty and hyper-opinionated. The reason is partly because there's no rating or other feedback system, no peer review, control, or reputation, other than the hyper-critical comments that others might in turn launch at someone being hyper critical, in which case, so what? I've seen people take up 85% of a letters section with their own comments, posting over and over and over, and if others slam them for being obnoxious or for anything else it just fuels the flames, it doesn't do anything to put them out.

We're still all working out how this online thing works, clearly, but believe me this is not the way to do it. If you look at other sites, DKos for example seems to have the best method, a rating system that makes your online reputation actually matter, so that people to some degree are influenced to produce somewhat thoughtful, useful posts, not just nasty knee-jerk criticism. There are exceptions of course, but anyone posting really nasty comments over and over in a thread would soon be removed.

The trade-off of course is that there's a certain amount of like-mindedness at other sites, whereas here it's clearly a free for all, extreme right wing Republicans seem to post here about as often as any other persuasion, at least going by the some of the comments. It's not as bad as other wide open sites, like some newspapers, but it's close.

Anyway the point is really that I would second what Breathed said. If you're going to actually read letters here, be prepared for the fact that the majority of them seem to just look for something nasty to say about whatever they're reading. Me included, from time to time, but as I say that's what this system lends itself to, it's human nature to some degree.

See, but your short comment was far, far more interesting than this movie was.

Contrary to some other posters trying to use juvenile insults against anyone who found this movie idiotic, people are saying they disliked this film because it's cartoonish (and not intentionally like an animated movie) and lazy filmmaking, not because they're squeamish about violence. Anyone is entitled to like or dislike this movie of course, but the blanket judgment of anyone who dislikes it is as vapid as the movie was.

Your descriptions of people from your actual experience was infinitely more rich and fascinating than this shallow string of stereotypes made into a movie. Characters like the pudgy guy you'd never suspect of being the most dangerous and so on-- now those would be interesting characters. Don't expect anything like that from this movie, which relies on easy cliches from start to finish.

It's really not that hard, despite what some in Hollywood (and I include Besson, who despite being from France is as Hollywood as they get, an opinion everyone I know in France shares) would have you think. If you make movies based on life, instead of based on stupid cliches you saw in other movies, then it comes alive. Your brief letter based on experiences you actually had accomplishes in seconds something that Besson's movies never do. Never.