Quicksand (2004)

Good movie but grossly overrated

good back-story, and good acting

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

I once heard a saying that all happy families are the same but all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way. While not all good movies are the same, it's certainly true that bad movies come in an almost infinite number of varieties. Quicksand would be a particular sort of terrible film known as the "Movie Star Vacation Project". It's where not-all-that-talented people manage to get the money to produce their horrible script solely because one or more genuine movie stars agrees to act in it, but the stars only agree to do it because the film is being shot in a certain location where the star would like to hang out for a couple of months. They don't give a damn whether the movie is any good or not, they just look at it as a paid vacation.Martin Raikes (Michael Keaton) is a bank examiner who goes to the south of France to check on an allegation of improper financial behavior at a movie studio. Once there, he meets Lela Forin (Judith Godreche), unaware that she's the frontwoman for a Russian mobster named Oleg (Rade Sherbedgia). It turns out Oleg is using the movie studio as a way to launder money, something which Raikes doesn't appear at all close to discovering but Oleg decides to frame him for the murder of a French police official anyway. Raikes has to flee the authorities and become a crime-stopping detective to uncover what's happened to him, something he takes to like a duck to water. Eventually he and Lela team up with Jake Mallows (Michael Caine), an aging British movie star who Oleg has hired to make a pretend film as part of the movie studio facade. There's also this bit about the Russians using the phony French studio to make rape videos and Raike's daughter gets kidnapped and there's this weird subplot back in the U.S. involving Raike's smartass and very pregnant secretary Beth Ann (Kathleen Wilhoite), which seems to exist just to make Quicksand about 15 minutes longer.The first hour of Quicksand is pretty boring and lame. The highlight of it is largely Raikes being chased by French police through a tunnel. Yeah, that's the best moment. Raikes grabs a handy shovel and uses it to knock out some lights, which somehow causes the police to lose track of him even though the tunnel remains brightly lit at all times. Even for a melodrama where it's more about running and shouting and blowing stuff up than making any sense, the lack of any sort of realistic behavior or action is quite apparent. This is supposed to be one of those stories about an ordinary guy ripped out of his ordinary life and his desperate struggle to escape from the foreign "quicksand" into which he's plunged. But while these filmmakers have clearly watched those sorts of movies, they clearly don't understand how to tell that story themselves. This is like one of those bad episodes from the later seasons of Miami Vice, with an extra 30 minutes tacked on. Yeah, it's that terrible.The last half hour of this film, however, is more than just boring and lame. It descends into a bizarre and apparently unintentional parody. At least it's unintentional for the filmmakers. There's a point where you can tell Michael Keaton has figured out just how much this movie sucks and decides to see how far he can push the suck. It's not that he phones in his performance, but he doesn't bother to try and salvage anything decent of this mess. He just goes full bore, almost as though he wants to deliberately emphasize how silly and simplistic the story becomes. That's unlike Michael Caine, who does the same professional job and takes the story as seriously as he does anything else.There's no way Keaton and Caine were paid a lot of money to do this film and even though Caine is a old-school actor who'll take almost any job offered to him, you know the only reason they're in this is because when they weren't on set, they could lounge around Europe on the producer's dime. That's a pretty sweet deal for them. It's fairly sour for those of us unlucky enough to watch Quicksand.

'Quicksand' was showing this evening on CH 5, Now I'm always very wary of watching movies on that particular channel as it has become synonymous with terrible films, but I decided to watch purely on it's starring actors, in this case being Michael Caine & Michael Keaton, It's not a terrible film by any means, but it's just so mediocre, it's the kind of Film that even Steven Segal himself would probably turn down.Michael Keaton plays a New York Banker who travels to the South of France to investigate possible fraud on the Film that his company is financing, and soon finds himself up to his next in dirty cops & Russian gangsters and ends up getting framed for murder....YAWN!!!!Been there, done it, got the t-shirt! there is nothing in this film which hasn't been done better before.Michael Caine is really slumming it here, like he has done many times before..... JAWS IV: THE REVENGE or THE SWARM anyone?.... and makes what could be described as a glorified cameo.The Original 'Batman' Keaton pretty much disappeared after picking ghastly Movies to appear in, in the mid/late 90's, but really this is below him, Caine is merely cashing the check.apparently this was filmed in 2001 and not released for nearly 3 years...that tells you just about everything.as I've said above for a Film that never saw the inside of a Movie Theater it's not terrible, and watchable on TV on a Winter's night, but don't spend any money, it's not even worth the rental.**1/2 out of *****

1 This is a rough tough story, rated R in the USA. User comments at IMDb appear to be mixed. Some like this a lot. Some consider it weak compared to other stories in whatever genre they experience it as being part of. At least one considers the whole thing to be offensive for reasons of morality. I like it, but need untangling afterwards, there are real issues being tickled in this. The spoiler flag is because I am trying to muse on some difficult bits. 2 I experience the genre as Booby Buster. A spy – cops – gangster movie with bosoms that shine strong when their cute holders are busted. Some will consider such a genre to be immoral. Some will consider it to be a way to pass the time. Some will consider it to be a ball crusher, not for the squeamish. Some will not be surprised at a winking corpse. Hopefully there is scope for considering Quicksand to primarily be of a very different genre. 3 This as a sub genre, there are young people involved. I know other features close to this sub genre. One has a young Michael Caine. He travels to Newcastle because a relative has been killed and finds that the death was because a gangster had turned the early teen daughter to prostitution. I was too tied up by puritan ways when I saw this first to notice if there were bosoms. Modern times do make this feature stick in my memory, though. This might merit a different label to Booby Buster. Another is a spy story, a double agent who is not known as such, he climbs to the top of the Soviet spy world and is high in the USA spy world. Booby. He is putting the pressure on someone and has kidnapped most of the family to give himself pawns to use as pressure points. I did find this story a bit hot, okay. Modern times, it also sticks in the memory, for me. I assume that young people are needed for Quicksand to properly tell its story. That it is not gratuitous. Also, the Slavic pair do not shine, they cover and run. For me, a lot of modern Disney for kids is an equivalent to Booby B. Grit mixed with glam. 4 Sticking in the memory. As an underclass – big baby, I have been under long term pressure. Bratislava. On one side is pressure to follow puritan ways, my past makes me consider that to be a horrible way to be living dead. Quicksand. Becoming one of the countless grains of smoothed grit. On the other is pressure to – black bra and panties -, which for a fool is more like maroon bra and panties. Pressure to baby level in a lot of ways and ways to mature from baby level are regularly pruned. This is a different living death to the puritan way. Quicksand. To be able to watch a Booby Buster with no lingering trouble, I assume that one needs a mature and healthy sexual and social life and underclass cum big babies are under pressure for that to not be able to happen. Ever. This feature gives me lingering tangles that take a while to get a practical solution for. I still rate Quicksand, though I do not like such genre. The rough stuff with a girl and young women. One of the range of natural outcomes when Booby Buster cannot be faced okay? In part? Both sides as victims, everyone becomes grit? 5 This is my first UK DVD purchase from a La California second hand disk store. Three full weeks to arrive and a lot about this story is not bland. My disk rates an Oscar. I purchased it because it is a Clare Thomas, her of the 9ish Aggie of Madeline 1998. The term Booby Buster is from her in that role. Clare in Quicksand, very much an opposite to her others that I have. Those are fun and light, kiddie stuff, if with elements of the storyline of this one. In a way this fits her work well, just her bits miss out on the warmth that make the early work of such as her and Ashley Johnson stand out for me. The warmth here is grown up and comes from such as Michael Keaton, things are up side down. It is also an opposite in that she only appears occasionally. Clare at age 13, playing the daughter of the main actor, Keaton. Let down by dad, then kidnapped, if eventually rescued by dad she has every reason to say that reality is quicksand for this 13. She shines brightly in this, but I really prefer her other roles. 6 I like it that Caine is in this, just because of the genre echoes. He plays an aging actor who is not in tune with being a person, quicksand. But he can act. The non person appears briefly, in the early parts, later we are shown the other aspect. He has to cover a range of qualities and the weak is pure ham and the effective is extremely effective. It is easy to consider that he has a lousy script, but really it is just the role. 7Quicksand is not so far from the world of Anna Popplewell and Thunderpants 2001, which is a waste sort of thing. Instead of Caine there is Rupert Grint. It is not Booby B.

It's not that good, but not too bad either. It's nice if you love France but are not there. If you're looking for a thriller, look elsewhere. The characters are rather flat, like cardboard cut outs. The plot is predictable and surreal, if not totally unreal. And, the chemistry between the characters are dry. Like between Keaton's character and the lead actress - you almost hope there's nothing going on between them because it'd be too predictable, but at the same time, you don't have the chance to hope so because it seems like there's no spark at all between them. It's rather hard too to tell who's who for each other unless you listen to their dialogue. Just too bad I missed the blinking corpse part - I didn't watch from the beginning! To be fair, it kept me watching until the end, and it's rather amusing to watch the predictable flow.