Movie Reviews

When Kym returns to the Buchman family home for the wedding of her sister Rachel, she brings a long history of personal crisis, family conflict and tragedy along with her. The wedding couple's abundant party of friends and relations have gathered for a joyful weekend of feasting, music and love, but Kym - with her biting one-liners and flair for bombshell drama - is a catalyst for long-simmering tensions in the family dynamic.

John Frankenheimer did a brilliant job with this thriller. The film doesn’t play down to audiences and doesn’t feel the need to explain every little detail along the way. This leaves you guessing a lot, but that just puts you in the same situation as the characters within the film. The action sequences are intense and the car chases are still some of the best put on film to date. Still one of the better action thrillers of the last decade.

This Blu-ray release appears to be identical to the version released in other markets early on in the format and judging from the tech specs it appears this one has been sitting on a shelf waiting for release for quite some time. The video is presented in a rather low average bitrate MPEG2 encode but I actually thought the picture held up quite nicely. Some of the longer shots and establishing shots are a bit soft and somewhat noisy, but the principal photography holds up quite well with good dimension and detail. Fine object detail is pretty much reserved for tight close ups but still looks quite good. Colors are slightly muted but true to the presentations I’ve seen before. I didn’t notice any compression issues and this title doesn’t look like it’s been tinkered with or enhanced. Overall a solid presentation and a nice step up from the previous DVD releases.

The 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack is good but dynamic range isn’t quite what we’ve become used to with big Hollywood action films of late. The car chases are quite intense and the surround design stands up really well here with nice panning effects and discrete surround use. Low bass extension is okay but not flooring and at times some of the gunplay can sound a bit thin. Dialogue is natural enough though a tad bit forward.

Fox only includes the theatrical trailer for this one.

This is still a great action thriller and one of the better in the last decade in my humble opinion. Fox has done a good job with the presentation despite the dated encode making this an easy recommendation for fans and newcomers alike.