SnoopyStyle Detectives Havenhurst (Willem Dafoe) and Vargas (Michael Peña) are called to a crime scene. Mrs. McCullam has been stabbed to death. Her son Brad McCullam (Michael Shannon) is the prime suspect and he has taken hostages in the house across the street. The police interviews his fiancé Ingrid Gudmundson (Chloë Sevigny) and director Lee Meyers (Udo Kier) who reveal past incidents and his mental deterioration.This is Werner Herzog and therefore it must be a masterpiece. He is taking the familiar cop crime drama and mixing it with a character study of a disturb mind. He has created his own language and a wonderful new form of cinema. What if this is not Werner Herzog? Then this would be a confusing, boring piece of crap. The constant reliance on flashbacks drains any immediacy and tension from the movie. These are great actors. The structure of the movie really let the whole thing down. Instead of his voice, his vision is a mess of the traditional genre.

clbobman There has been a lot of bad talk about this film but I have watched a lot of Herzog and I love this movie. It is an investigation primarily on mental illness, city life, and how people can get really messed up inside the "walls" of the city (and the little enclaves like families that exist within it). A very strong performance by Michael Shannon and I have to say this guy is really starting to hit his straps now after starting out in bit-part hoodlum roles etc., many years ago. He really has an intensity in this role that no-one else could have accessed, and I mean no-one. This was casting at its absolute best; his big physical presence and natural 1000 yard stare really added to the role. Again Herzog has gone out and made a movie that no-one else wanted to make. It has been a while since I saw it now, but I remember a moment of pure beauty at the end of the movie, I think with with a boy, a ball and a tree within the hugeness of the mega-city wasteland. These are moments where Herzog somehow gives us his inner feelings.

Cosmoeticadotcom Shannon is pitch perfect with his madness, starting from a Peruvian kayaking trip he demurs from (the scene of the start of another of Herzog's great films on insanity, Aguirre: The Wrath Of God), which kills his friends, to his assumption of the name Farouk, to his belief that the face of God resides on an oatmeal container, to his calm bizarreness in general. Sevigny is excellent as the clueless and desperately lonely fiancée, while Kier delights as the agog friend- and Herzog makes ironic use of Kier's iconic stature as a horror film actor to rein him in to comment on assorted bizarre things he witnesses, such as the over the top scenes between Brad and his loony and racist ostrich farming uncle Ted (Brad Dourif), which ends in a classic 'Herzog Moment' involving a dwarf. While Dourif chews scenery, it's perfectly apropos to the moment the film unhinges itself, and also given that we see this partly from Brad's POV. Other odd moments occur when we see Brad at Machu Picchu, in a Tibetan marketplace, and seeking to buy pillows for 'the sick, in general, ' at a San Diego military hospital, and often these scenes, retrospectively, are seen as telegraphed earlier, but not in the ham-handed way a Steven Spielberg would do so. The film ends with Brad's surrender, and asking Havenhurst two questions: 1) could he put in his report that it was ostriches running, not flamingos, that were the birds involved, and 2) what happened to his basketball, which, in the film's final shot, we see a small boy pluck out of the branches of a tree.Herzog's direction is flawless, and cameraman Peter Zeitlinger does his usual sparkling cinematography by making blasé San Diego seem feral. Ernst Reijseger's score is apropos to the scenes, but the weak link is the film's screenplay, written by Herzog and Herbert Golder. It is good, for all it does; the problem is with just a few more moments and scenes, here and there, this 91 minute film, at 100 or so minutes, could have hit greatness. Some critics missed the boat and panned this excellent work, usually bemoaning it as a bastard love child between director Herzog and producer David Lynch, but there is little Lynchian material here. It is all Herzog. And it is definitely NOT a black comedy. Moments of humor do not make a film a comedy. It is straight on drama, and very realistic to the point that its utter lack of real poesy hurts it, artistically. Still, this is a relative claim since Herzog oozes cinematic poesy in almost all his films.

kershmey_baker I wasn't entirely surprised to see the lacklustre rating IMDb had given this film, given its not the sort of movie that lets you 'enjoy' it in the conventional sense. None of the characters are particularly likable, the near entirety of the plot is revealed in the first few minutes, and the rest of the film is but giving you often surreal glimpses of how the characters came to this point. These, however, are not negative characteristics, or at least not where I'm concerned. The movie isn't 'pleasant', but its viscerally emotional; dark theatre that truly challenges the audience usually in subtle ways, but then at times quite directly, tearing down the fourth wall to do so.Willem Dafoe's role in the movie is understated, as are his scenes... he's something like the narrator as Detective Hank, and in the absence of the lead, his interactions seem strangely scripted, almost as if he's forgotten what an excellent actor he is. I get the impression this air of 'woodenness' around his scenes, especially his early scenes, is intentional... his scenes take place in the 'now' of the story, which seems a bland and almost plastic atmosphere... its when they track back to the 'past' that the Movie really begins to take shape as an almost anxious nightmare. Michael Shannon as Brad is spectacular. He's a grown man who seems trapped in the persona of a desperately sullen child, unstable and overwhelmed by the world around him. As we begin to empathize with Brad, he seems to make the very normal, modern, clean suburban world around him seem almost like a dystopia simply by his presence.The real star of this film in my mind was Grace Zabriskie, who played Brad's mother. She's always been an absolutely superb character actress, has given me the willies in more than one Lynch film, but never have I seen her shine so much than in this film as the submissively overbearing Ms. McCullum. She is a woman who seems to validate her own existence through the life of her disturbed son, and is incredibly desperate for appreciation. The most powerful bit of acting in the movie, in any movie I've seen in a long while in fact, involved her lingering in a doorway awaiting a thank-you from her son and his girlfriend. Her dwindling hope and mounting terror and despair with gradually dampening eyes as the moment stretched and stretched gripped like a fist behind my navel... such concentrated emotion is a testament to what a spectacular performer she is. The movie is excellent, but not for the impatient or those who can't appreciate artistic abstraction in film, nor for those who want a 'feel good' flick. This movie won't make you feel 'good', but it will make you feel, and think, a great deal.