Running time: 96 minutes
Starring: Michelle Williams, Ewan McGregor, Matthew McFadyen, Sidney Johnston, Jonathan Andrews
Rating 1 out of 10
After hitting the jackpot with the massively successful Bridget Jones's Diary, writer/director Sharon Maguire hits rock bottom with Incendiary, a ghastly film that is a depressing cinematic experience. Not just because it deals with urban terrorism in contemporary London, but because it deals with it in such a misguided and patronising manner.
There are so many things wrong that it's the type of film that makes you wonder how it ever got made (presumably Maguire's stock was so high after her initial success that she had free rein to choose any project). It's adapted by the director from Chris Cleave's 2005 novel about the after-effects of a bomb at the Arsenal Football Stadium, and totters unevenly between romance on the one hand and an attempted comment on the threats facing modern society through terrorism on the other. Judging from the screening I attended, most people found it unintentionally comic.
Michelle Williams - the film's sole redeeming feature - plays a young London Mum who lives in a council flat with her husband, a bomb disposal expert (surely he would earn enough to house them in a nicer environment). She seems to exist solely on fish fingers (yes, it's that patronising), and gazes wistfully out to the adjoining Georgian-style square where one-dimensional Daily Express reporter Ewan McGregor lives in a swanky flat. While her husband and son attend the fateful match, McGregor's character explains the finer detail of the offside rule to her on the sofa.
Later Matthew Macfadyen turns up as the year's dullest screen character, a policeman investigating the bombing and one whose beard emotes more than the man himself. There are so many terrible mistakes in the detail that it becomes infuriating, but to list a few: Sky do not show league matches on a Saturday afternoon; neither does Sky News credit Daily Express journalists with breaking news stories; you are not allowed to park a caravan on the beach at Camber Sands and the smoking ban came into place in July 2007, so supposedly real characters in 2008 would not be allowed to smoke in the pub.
Add to this the maudlin idea of 900 large balloons floating over London, each carrying the face of a bomb victim, and a particularly arch plotline in which Williams' character tries to befriend the son of the man who may have planted the bomb and the result is a cinematic disaster. Certainly one of the year's worst offerings, and anyone who has the unfortunate experience of paying to see this at the cinema has a valid case to ask for their money back.
Paul Hurley
There are so many things wrong that it's the type of film that makes you wonder how it ever got made (presumably Maguire's stock was so high after her initial success that she had free rein to choose any project). It's adapted by the director from Chris Cleave's 2005 novel about the after-effects of a bomb at the Arsenal Football Stadium, and totters unevenly between romance on the one hand and an attempted comment on the threats facing modern society through terrorism on the other. Judging from the screening I attended, most people found it unintentionally comic.
Michelle Williams - the film's sole redeeming feature - plays a young London Mum who lives in a council flat with her husband, a bomb disposal expert (surely he would earn enough to house them in a nicer environment). She seems to exist solely on fish fingers (yes, it's that patronising), and gazes wistfully out to the adjoining Georgian-style square where one-dimensional Daily Express reporter Ewan McGregor lives in a swanky flat. While her husband and son attend the fateful match, McGregor's character explains the finer detail of the offside rule to her on the sofa.
Later Matthew Macfadyen turns up as the year's dullest screen character, a policeman investigating the bombing and one whose beard emotes more than the man himself. There are so many terrible mistakes in the detail that it becomes infuriating, but to list a few: Sky do not show league matches on a Saturday afternoon; neither does Sky News credit Daily Express journalists with breaking news stories; you are not allowed to park a caravan on the beach at Camber Sands and the smoking ban came into place in July 2007, so supposedly real characters in 2008 would not be allowed to smoke in the pub.
Add to this the maudlin idea of 900 large balloons floating over London, each carrying the face of a bomb victim, and a particularly arch plotline in which Williams' character tries to befriend the son of the man who may have planted the bomb and the result is a cinematic disaster. Certainly one of the year's worst offerings, and anyone who has the unfortunate experience of paying to see this at the cinema has a valid case to ask for their money back.
Paul Hurley
