He Was a Quiet Man (2007)

Truly Dreadful Film

Simply Perfect

Must See Movie...

Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

I can't claim to have had any high hopes or expectations for this movie, but the synopsis seemed somewhat interesting, so I gave it a chance. And doing that was a win on my part, because this movie was entertaining and so well-told by director Frank A. Cappello.The story is about Bob Maconel who is planning a shooting at his dead end job, being tired of being a nobody, a joke, an outcast and a faceless being in the crowd. As he is mustering up the courage to initiate his plan, someone beats him to it, and the day takes on a very different turn for Bob.This is without a doubt the best performance from Christian Slater that I have ever seen. He nailed this role and character right on the head, and he really carried the movie quite well. Alongside him was Elisha Cuthbert whom also put on a great performance.There isn't a dull moment throughout this movie and I was more than entertained throughout the course of "He Was a Quiet Man". And this movie is well-worth sitting down to watch. There is a great continuous flow to the story and you really get sucked into the storyline right from the very beginning, because of the acting performances and the great directorial work.

With a truly creative story and a couple of engaging and image-busting performances, He Was a Quiet Man is a welcome relief from so many films that aren't nearly as clever as they think they are. I can honestly say that this movie kept surprising me with its plot twists and emotional sincerity. Writer-director Frank A. Cappello supplements his neat script with some striking imagery and lassos outstanding performances from his two leads. It's deliberately odd and unlike most motion pictures, it's must better in the middle than the beginning or the end, but this is a fine and almost exceptional piece of work.Bob Maconel (Christian Slater) is a balding, near-sighted cubicle drone. His only joys in life are catching a fleeting glimpse of the smile of his beautiful co-worker Vanessa (Elisha Cuthbert), the talking fish in his aquarium that his delusional mind has cooked up and his violent thoughts about launching a murder spree in the office. Bob is pretty much the perfect example of the isolated, barely functional guy whose rage at the world builds and builds until it finally explodes. But when the day comes and bullets start flying and bodies start falling at Bob's workplace, he's not the one doing the shooting. Some other angrily lonely loser goes on a rampage and Bob goes from office freak and whipping boy to office hero when he blows the killer away, no one realizing that Bob brought a gun to work so HE could kill everyone. What happens after that is something you should experience for yourself.I wasn't sure about this film at the start. It seemed very obvious what it was about and where it would be going, to the point where it seemed to be trying to hard. There's a point where a couple of Bob's co-workers torment him like they were all still in middle school that's transparently fake and manipulative. But I never expected someone else to go kill-crazy at Bob's office and never imagined how he'd react to that or any of the stuff that would follow. Cappello does an excellent job of setting up a story that can really only go in one direction and, with a single crazily believable twist, sends it soaring off somewhere else. It's the sort of moment that every storyteller aspires to and he nails it.Christian Slater is committed and unflinching as Bob. He's playing a screwed up loser and there's never a second in the movie where he abandons or ignores that essence. Even when he's trying to help the audience understand and empathize with what the character is feeling and needing, Slater never lets you forget that Bob has serious problems that will ultimately doom him.Yet while Slater's superb acting gets most of the spotlight, Elisha Cuthbert is calmly amazing. Most folks probably know her as Jack Bauer's daughter from 24 and I saw her name in the opening credits, but I actually forgot it was her while I was watching the film. She starts out playing Bob's fantasy, evolves into a harsh reality and then transcends that into a new existence. There's a scene that highlights a reality of life for people with severe disabilities that's at first squirmingly uncomfortable to watch, but Cuthbert draws you in and transfixes with the human dignity of her character. You stop reacting to the situation and you start reacting to her.Now, the ending is a bit contrived, especially after the impressively organic stuff in the middle of the picture. And the movie doesn't appear to appreciate the difference between a man who's crushingly unhappy and a guy who's insane, which produces a few moments where you can't be sure that the film is sure of what it's doing. Those are minor kvetches, however.He Was a Quiet Man is enjoyable and perversely charming. Everybody involved should be proud of what they made.

"He was a quiet man" is a astoundingly well written, decently directed little movie with an amazing performance by Christian Slater as an outsider and weirdo who's just about to crack. By now, Slater should have redeemed himself for whatever Uwe Boll- flick or Hollow Man- Sequel he did in the past and should rise again to the top of the Hollywood elite. After this and Bobby he really deserves it. This is definitely the first picture I've seen where Slater's character is really challenging, and he manages to show the audience a flawless performance beyond all criticism. Seeing him in Mindhunter and Alone in the Dark, one would have never guessed that he's still got that powerful gift of creating a character that you can appreciate and understand from the very beginning. The great screenplay helped a lot, I guess, but nevertheless this is the rise of Christian Slater. Please recognize that.

Warning! Major, Major spoilers ahead! I've read a number of the other reviews here and it seems only a handful of people actually figured this movie out. Of course, I may be completely off base as well, but the reviews that make a comparison to Incident at Owl Creek are, I believe, on the right track. Basically, this is a psychotic version of Incident at Owl Creek. Let me try to outline it here - either spoiling it terribly if you haven't seen it or possibly helping you appreciate it a bit more if you have:The first 25 minutes introduce us to Bob(Christian Slater), an office worker who is working up the courage to do the disgruntled postal worker routine. The rest of the movie happens in Bob's imagination in the instant before he does the actual deed. It is important to remember - both during the first 25 minutes and throughout the rest of the movie - that we are seeing Bob's coworkers through his eyes...and Bob is psychotic. I say it's important to remember this because all the people around Bob are the Office Workers from Hell. They are so cartoonish and over the top that if you don't catch on that this is how Bob sees them and not the actual people they probably are, you may be prone to eject this DVD and not give it the chance it deserves. There is the thoroughly nasty immediate supervisor, the mindless and boorish fellow cubicle workers, the office slut, the sleazy boss and the unattainable beauty of a secretary.In the real world, these would all be fairly normal denizens of a fairly normal office. They may have all at one time or another committed some small personal slight or evidenced some character trait that caused terrible damage to Bob's psyche. But remember, Bob is gonzo - and since we're seeing everything from Bob's perspective, their flaws are exponentially magnified and we can't blame him for wanting to exterminate this herd of troglodytes.When Bob's moment of decision comes, we suddenly find ourselves (as we learn later) in an extended fantasy where instead of being the homicidal maniac, Bob becomes the hero as he thwarts another psycho partway through stealing Bob's thunder with a massacre of his own. The rest of the movie relentlessly unveils the self-destructive nature of Bob's twisted mind. Bob warps his virginal heroine into someone neither so virginal nor so heroic as she ought to be, and even though Bob does everything right (of course he does - it's his fantasy after all!) a relationship with her becomes impossible. His imagined promotion to Vice President of Creative Thinking only reveals how pathetic his creative thinking is. His fantasy of the big boss is even worse than he had previously thought. Heroic Bob imagines himself with every advantage he can think of, yet cannot imagine any of it turning out good for him or for anyone else. By the end of the movie we find him back at his moment of decision, gun in hand, about to begin his rampage. It is at this moment he has his one instant of clarity: When he is unable to distinguish whether the woman at the water cooler is his unattainable beauty or the office slut, he finally and mercifully comes to the realization that the only person in the room who is damaged goods is the one holding the pistol. And in his one moment of lucidity, he culls the herd.Now, how do I know this? It all becomes clear - or should - in the last few moments of the movie, when his home is cordoned off and everything in it is as it was at the beginning of the movie; when the TV interviews are only the boilerplate, "He was a quiet man" quotes and say nothing about the Hero Who Turns Homicidal Maniac that would be splashed all over the news had the previous hour been factual rather than fantasy.I would have rated the movie much lower if I hadn't figured out what was going on, but once understood it becomes an interesting study of a psychotic mind. And I would have rated it even higher if they would have added about a 5 to 10 minute epilogue depicting the people around Bob as they actually were, rather than as the monsters Bob showed us they were. I don't think it would have hurt the twist at all - in fact, I think the stark contrast could really have added a jolt for the audience at the end as people tried to figure out how all these rotten characters suddenly became so, well, normal.