But there's no getting around the fact that several of the lead performances are stiff to the point of amateurishness (at least until the plot gets cooking about halfway through, and everyone gets to suffer, sweat, bleed and scream). And the script manages to be too much and not enough, gesturing clumsily in the direction of what the critic Anne Billson calls the Preposterous Thriller, while at the same time shoehorning in bits of social critique about the haves and have-nots that make "Shattered" come off as the movie "Parasite" could have been, were it possible to repeatedly drop a film on its head.
Adieu Monsieur Haffmann Streaming
"Shattered" is a twist-driven film. But the twists don't follow real-world logic. Nor do they embrace the dream-world anti-logic of great psychosexual thrillers like "Fatal Attraction," "Body Double," "Basic Instinct" or the late-in-the-game classic "Gone Girl," the kinds of pictures where absurdities and outrages pile up to the point where the audience starts giggling with unhinged delight. Suffice to say that if you're still interested in the movie, you should check out of this review now.
The man, Chris Decker (Cameron Monaghan of the American remake of "Shameless") is a tech entrepreneur who recently sold his company for many millions of dollars. He has a wife (Sasha Luss) and daughter (Ridley Bateman) from whom he's about to be separated by divorce. He lives in the aforementioned dream house, which looks down on the plebes in town like the home of the tycoon in Akira Kurosawa's far more politically cogent "High and Low." The young woman, who calls her herself Sky (Lily Krug), lives in a residential motel run by an affable dirtbag named Ronald (John Malkovich, who gives one of the film's only two memorable performances) and has a self-destructive roommate (Ash Santo's Lisa) whom she supposedly goes home with Chris to escape.
What ensues is a story that seesaws between exuberant nonsense and a sort of half-assed sociopolitical riff, mixing resentment of amoral techno-fascist douchebros, fascination with their show-off houses, and a slightly pervy obsession with model-actress-whatever types who might not, factually speaking, be teetering on the edge of the age of legal consent, but are made up and costumed to evoke a barely pubescent anime waif, or Lolita. Krug and Monaghan, I'm sorry to say, are terrible in this, though it's hard to blame them entirely or even partially, given the lumpiness of the script and the director's seeming incapability of steering into the skid and producing a glorious wreck of a movie, the kind audiences cheer lustily even though they know it's dumb.
A lot of the issues come back to the question of whether you're watching the kind of film that cares about believable psychology or one that could not care less. It handles the distress of Sky's roommate more sensitively than one might expect, but it also has the hero getting his leg broken with a tire iron during an attempted car break-in and then gives us zero indication of how that shockingly brutal crime might've affected the victim's psyche (right afterward, he acts as if it was a minor inconvenience).
We eventually realize we'll never be able to figure out who Sky "really is" because there's nothing in her head except greed and evil. Kudos, kind of, for taking one more giant step into raw, uncut sleaze by bringing in character actor Frank Grillo (the film's other memorable performance) to play a preening, wiseass, thug-mastermind type. Grillo's smirky delivery, New York tough guy swagger, and retro-'50s pompadour read as a deliberate invocation of Mickey Rourke, the crown prince of screen debauchery in the late '80s and early '90s, and the star of Michael Cimino's remake of the home invasion thriller "The Desperate Hours," which the final third of the film sometimes resembles (along with both versions of "Funny Games").
https://onlinestreming4k.blogspot.com/2022/01/your-gut-tells-you-that-hero-of.html
https://canvas.ubc.ca/eportfolios/44163/Home/Who_Asks_His_Advice_on_Which_Wine_to_Buy
https://eduteka.icesi.edu.co/proyectos.php/2/141456
http://escueladiaconia.es/blog/index.php?entryid=75859
https://promosimple.com/ps/1ac86/stutmen
https://zephrus.blog.fc2.com/blog-entry-5.html
http://bioimagingcore.be/q2a/459579/film-sometimes-resembles-along-with-both-versions-funny-games
https://kuntal.org/kuntal/blog/view/39904/a-lot-of-the-issues-come-back-to-the-question-of-whether
