Really Surprised!

Let's be realistic.

Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

I am sure that if I had watched the director's cut, I would have hated the commercial version of Dolphins. But I guess it is like wine; if you only know a modest local wine, without having tasted a 1989 Bordeaux, you will certainly appreciate the local wine. As I have unfortunately not been able to watch the original version of the movie, I actually loved the commercial version. A few guys and myself went to the birthday of a friend who is passionated by cars, and he wanted to watch with us a new DVD that he had got recently. We were not very motivated because cars are are not our main preoccupation. Then he went on the internet and we watched together the trailer of Dolphins- http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi3969712665/ , and it looked like a film for 14- years old car lovers... but our friend was so motivated that we finally comfortably sat in front of the screen with a few beers (we did not find any Bordeaux). And it was absolutely not the kind of film we were expecting... very convincing actors, and also an emotional dimension. The director has been able to describe a very very dark world, full of violence, drugs... and in this hell, a fragile love story between 2 fragile people. The death of one important person of the film at the end is very surprising and shocking. But it is a great idea from the scriptwriter. If you have the choice, watch the director's cut instead of the commercial one, it is certainly better. But if you can't get the original version, I still recommend the commercial movie, it is a very very enjoyable film!

From the outset, I should state that this is a review of the film DOLPHINS as cut by the Director Mark Jay, and not the bastardized DVD version (brought out as Dolphins by Sony in Europe and as Octane by Lionsgate in the US) that seems to have so disappointed the reviewers who have already posted. Word has it that the DVD version was re-cut by the distributors without the director's involvement.I was lucky enough to catch the Director's Cut of Dolphins at the BOLOGNA FILM FESTIVAL in Italy. I liked it enough to want to have a DVD copy, but when the DVD arrived in the post I realized why the previous reviews had been so negative... it's a very different film! I'll speak about the DIRECTOR'S CUT of Dolphins first then come back to the DVD version of Dolphins/Octane.The DIRECTOR'S CUT: Filmed in Brighton UK, it is a story about two youngsters from different sides of the tracks who meet by chance and fall in love. Ophelia James is a beautiful, self-harming, punk princess who lives in a large and luxurious house by the sea. Brent Black is a bright, handsome young bloke from a poor, rundown housing estate. The classic story is given an original twist by being set against the background of Brighton's illegal street racing scene, with its amazing customized cars and go-faster attitude.Most of the cast give wonderfully convincing naturalistic performances. Despite the low budget listed on IMDb, it has remarkably high production values, with the racing scenes being particularly impressive. Most scenes are shot with a striking documentary style realism that draws the viewer in. These are inter-cut with beautiful and poetic images in the romantic scenes, which demonstrate the director's strong and original visual eye. The pairing of these two opposing styles shouldn't work, but they are so skilfully woven together that it does. The action is backed by a series of well-chosen and often classic tracks, although the scored music is a little underwhelming in places. My vote for the DIRECTOR'S CUT of Dolphins is 7.5/10, but considering it's a first feature I'm impatient to see what Mark Jay will do next.The DVD VERSION of Dolphins/Octane is very different. The film has been re-cut in an apparent attempt to convert it from an across the tracks romance into a boy racers' bonanza. It's obviously trying to be a UK version of "The Fast and the Furious", but it doesn't work. A lot of what's good in Dolphins has been brutally and ineptly cut out and replaced, it appears, by alternative takes of the racing scenes. The result is flat, unbalanced and uninspiring. It's difficult to understand why someone would take a perfectly good film and ruin it!! My vote for the DVD VERSION of Dolphins/Octane is 6/10.

This tired old love story about a rich girl and a boy from the wrong side of the tracks does distinguish itself in several ways.1. The girl isn't really rich. She's more like the Eurotrash spawn of the comfortably upper middle class.2. The boy really is poor, yet drives around in a souped-up muscle car that had to have cost tens of thousands of dollars to make it what it is. Considering that the boy shares bunkbeds with his retarded brother in his jobless dad's unit in a public housing complex, I think all that money could have been spent more wisely.3. The boy starts out the story with a pregnant girlfriend. That he leaves her to be with the not-really-rich girl isn't unusual. What's strange is that the pregnant girlfriend spends much of her time on screen drinking and smoking. I know the English can be a bit lax on oral hygiene, but I can't believe they're so blasé about alcohol, tobacco and unborn children.4. The not-really-rich girl indulges in self-mutilation, which the boy and everyone else seems to regard as a hobby and not a sign of deep emotional problems.5. The boy is part of the street racing sub-culture in Brighton, England and the movie sets up a big race with some bad guys…which the boy then wins through pure dumb luck. I don't think I've ever seen another film where the hero has his moment of glory thanks entirely to random chance.6. The girl starts out with a Eurotrash boyfriend, but instead of that guy beating up the boy and telling him to stay away from the girl, the boy is the one who decks him and turns the boyfriend into a cowering wussy before the movie is even halfway over.7. This film does have a moment that demonstrates how cell phones have become the bane of lazy writers. The boy goes to a garden outside the girl's home and texts her to come out and meet him. They boy then gets a call about a fire at the garage where he works. The boy leaves and the girl is supposed to think he's deserted her…but why wouldn't he simply text her again on his way to the garage and explain it to her? Damn you technology for making it harder to justify stupid romantic misunderstandings! 8. Octane is not only a gritty, urban romance. It's also a public service announcement about the dangers of huffing aerosol sprays.9. There's a menacing guy in a fancy car who appears to be a superfluous bad guy that writer/director Mark Jay forgot about. He constantly shows up and glares at the boy, even seems to be responsible for some of the bad things that happen to him, but menacing guy doesn't take part in the big race and simply disappears from the story.Besides all that, a weird running gag involving geometry and occasionally unintelligible working class English accents, everything else in Octane is pretty much by the numbers. The direction is okay and the acting, especially by Karl Davies and Lauren Steventon as the young lovebirds, is good. It's just that there's been hundreds of American movies and TV shows that told this exact same story in almost the exact same way. Unless you need to see some evidence America and England actually are two countries divided by a common language, there's nothing here worth your while.

Perhaps it helped that the DVD cover promised yet another racing film that it didn't really deliver or perhaps the fact that I watched some of the British coming of age films from the 1960's and 70's recently, but I kind of liked this story of a young man from the English coast who falls in to street racing and has a confused relationship with a dark haired beauty. To be certain the plot isn't anything we haven't seen before, but the film seems to come alive with a good score and a very real sense of place and of people. Give the film a point or two for the good cast making things work. Is it the best thing out of the box? Certainly not, but it is a nice unexpected diversion that was welcome relief in the midst of an evening of really bad movies. Between 6 and 7 out of 10