A Major Disappointment

I was totally surprised at how great this film.You could feel your paranoia rise as the film went on and as you gradually learned the details of the real situation.

It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

Maybe they should have called Agent Scully instead and ... Well I should stop right there. First off, I don't even know which one was Scully and second of all, this is one of the traps our leading lady might fall into. Even me, and I haven't seen any X-Files episode, know her from that show. And while she was really good and funny in a romantic comedy 10 years ago, I do think that the X-Files are hanging over her head (for most people that is).But that is not, what is most wrong about this movie. It is very bleak and very dark (and I'm not only talking cinematography, which is fine, but also mood-wise). I wouldn't have a problem with that and even the female lead gets away with it (and then some), but Danny Dyer is the weak link here.He seems like a fun bloke (as you would say), but he can't handle the role. Plus it's not superbly written to begin with. Still and because I do love strange things, I kinda bared with it all ... I can't promise you will be able too though (or if you are gonna even love it... ?)

Dan Reed, an award winning documentary director, débuts with a thriller that will only be watched for its self proclaimed shock value and soon forgotten for the lack of this and, quite frankly, any value whatsoever.Alice's (Gillian Anderson) and Adam's (Danny Dyer) meeting is one of a chance. After he installs an alarm system in her upper class apartment, she invites him to a dull house warming party in a countryside in the unlike role of a sex toy. Their accident is one of a chance too. Alice hits a deer and they are both forced to pull over to remove the suffering animal from the road. There, they are attacked by three men they passed by earlier on. Adam is brutally beat up and Alice's raped. After one month recovery, she manages to return to work and Adam, with one eye blind and his face scarred stays locked at her home, struggling to overcome his accident inflicted impotence. When Alice learns of her father's death she drives to the countryside again where she encounters one of the rapists. She persuades Adam to take revenge they supposedly deserve.Reed, with a brief 76 minutes running time, skips any unnecessary expositions but unfortunately in the process, looses most of the motivation for both the characters and the audience. What's left is paper thin. Dyer is his own, low class, laddish caricature and Anderson's middle aged, sexy businesswoman is played on a hysterical autopilot. Even their unlikely affair is played out with no true interest in an inevitable contrast they create. It seems that they both serve a foolish, deus ex machina plot where Reed's main moral concern is whether the revenge is not even more dehumanizing than animalistic behaviour that provokes it. He's bend on making a statement but with no interest in the process, he jumps right to the end far to quickly and makes the whole experience unconvincing and uninteresting.Straightheads, for the most part, plays out like a character film but the little emotional intimacy that the characters actually share, is blown away by the outbursts of violence and sex. They do little more but emphasize the growing brutalization of Adam and Alice-something so painfully obvious and insubstantial that it's difficult to find any justification for the grim tones that film hits. In its attempt on deep, structured emotional insight into the life post trauma, it seems to be too brief and relies too strongly on in-your-face violence to awake any serious afterthought.And even despite its length, Straightheads is a drag. With 20 minutes of deleted footage available on the DVD, it looks like it wasn't really sure of its narration's rhythm. It ultimately emphasizes little of the tension and drama that first rate thriller should provide and instead it dwells on cheap, worn out psychology. The metamorphosis of Adam and Alice is foreseeable and because of that disengaging. As the film, unbearably slowly, drifts towards its conclusion, Dyer's restrained pansy regresses into a violent psycho and the film reaches its feeble ending with no constructive point. It all ends too abruptly with ambiguity that is usually reserved for films of explicit intellectual strength. But Adam's stare on the audience remains empty- a worthless gesture, a last failed stunt committed by a film of a stunning, obscure numbness.Verdict: Straightheads seems like a challenging attempt but comes across as to scared of any serious commitment to its brutal, provocative subject. Instead it will try to shock you with relentless, gruesome images but it's all just a sombre bore. It recalls visceral, nauseating power of Straw Dogs and Irreversible but is nowhere near as engaging, original or graphic.1.5/5

After finishing watching this terrible, terrible piece of "film" I decided to log into IMDb and just let it all out. But then I took some time to read some of the reviews here and most of them pretty much summed up everything I felt about the movie.I'm a X-files fan, so I watched this only because featured Gillian Anderson, despite knowing that this was a bad movie.But come on! I mean, Did Gillian Anderson read the screenplay before signing to play this poor, unidimensional character? It is just terrible, painful, sad. You just don't care about her character or any other character as well. The story comes from nothing and goes to nowhere. Before 10 minutes into the picture you're already bored and asking yourself how a movie can be so bad.What the director/writer had in mind, what was the message? It's a cold movie, just a terrible experience. So, to sum up this garbage, there's no development at all, just plain and stupid nudity, violence and a terrible story.

Although I use this site quite frequently to see how other people rated what I think are challenging or just plain enjoyable films, after watching this "movie" on Film Four last night I felt compelled to write something down, even if it just helps cleanse me once again.The film was possibly the shallowest experience I've ever had - the main characters played by Danny Dyer (23? You sure?) and Gillian Anderson (who will always be Scully as Leonard Nimoy will always be Spock) had no real substance about them - I'm not sure if the first half-hour of the film didn't make the final cut but surely in a revenge movie you would like some empathy with the victims... here I couldn't care less. In fact, the only character I did seem to care about was the dog, with the stag coming a close second. And both animals out-acted Dire (sic) and Scully, who were quite frankly terrible. I guess though you're only as good as the script you are given, and I'd like to warmly thank the writers, the producers, the director and all of the cast for wasting 90 minutes of my life and some perfectly good electricity.