Side Effects

Bea says: This was certainly a gripping thriller and the time in the cinema passed very quickly indeed through its twists and turns. 

The first half was very good indeed, with a good amount of tension, pace and what was shaping up to be a very good – and subtle – story. 

But then something happened – as if the producers suddenly got worried that it was too boring and decided to make it a bit more sensational.  The storyline got rather silly at that point (complete with One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest-style mental health wards, the sudden onset of completely unexpected and unlikely sexually relationships etc) and if it weren’t for the stellar cast, the film would have been entirely lost.

However everyone acted on beautifully regardless (Catherine Zeta-Jones, Jude Law especially) and I had enough faith in the film to recommend it to others, with, however, the warning that the plot line did go downhill as the film progressed!  Not a bad night's entertainment however.

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Cecil says: I’m not really sure why this film reminded me of Usual Suspects. Maybe it was the very complex plot, with lots of layers and angles you can only really work out at the end, and even then you might have to go back to the beginning of the film to see all the clues as they appeared.

I’m also not really sure why they felt the need to begin the film with a scene showing a bloodied foot dragging its way across a floor, leaving ghastly stains behind. They then go back three months, and actually rush past this scene about half way through the rest of the narrative. Was the idea to intrigue us? To shock us? To make us do exactly what I’m doing now?

If so, rather like with Usual Suspects, I’m slightly annoyed at being manipulated like that for no real reason, and would rather have had a straight chronological telling of the story.

As it is, the story is a good one, with high drama, and lots of issues Americans in particular are grappling with day-in, day-out.

What ARE the side effects of the drugs against depression (or Rheumatoid arthritis) or any of the other branded drugs being advertised night after night on mainstream US TV channels?

Jude Law and Catherine Zeta-Jones do a great job, though it’s interesting Law is playing a doctor trained in the UK with full-on clipped British accent, whereas Zeta-Jones is playing an American psychiatrist. The other two main characters are played by Rooney Mara and Channing Tatum (don’t you just love these names where, if you didn’t know who they were, you would be hard-pressed to tell which name is male and which female?).

There are a few moments where you’d have to question the portrayal of a senior psychiatrist, as played by Jude Law. Would he really be so touchy-feely with his patients? Would he really interrupt a lunch with his wife to give one client five minutes, when it clearly wasn’t an emergency. I know they were trying to make us doubt his integrity, but you can take things a little too far to be believable.  

And I wish I could remember his quote about the British health system (as compared to the US) or exactly how they pronounced DerHam, where he is supposed to have studied...

It’s hard to say more without spoiling the plot for other viewers. It was a good film, time flew by, but it did lose marks for me in both its unnecessary complexity and its simplicity in some of the assumptions it made. Hard to see at face value how a film can do both, but go and see Side Effects for yourself and see what you think.

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