The
interlocking tales of four young women and some stolen diamonds.
The plan
for this movie is splendidly complicated. We see the same few days again and
again from the point of view of four different characters but instead of
alternating them like it normally happens we see them in straight order. So
first we see everything from the point of view of one girl, then to the second,
the third and the fourth only to resume normal filmmaking for the collective
ending.
The main
problem is that plot wise writer-director Noel Clarke doesn’t pull it off.
There is an enormous amount of contrivances that we need to digest, it’s all so
improbable that it really distracts from the story.
Moreover
Clarke doesn’t solve the main problem of these kind of exercises, the first
story is by definition the less interesting because we got such a thin slice of
the whole picture and Clarke not only fails to make it exciting, he actually
makes it a story about a depressed to the point of suicide girl.
Now nothing
bad with this kind of stories, if you are into them, but whoever buys – rents this
movie expecting a nice thriller is not the right costumer for a depressed plot.
The other
stories are also not that interesting honestly, the only one that manages to
get somewhere is the last, with Emma, niece of Julia, Roberts, which is luckily
more grounded in real life and real problems while the others posits themselves
as some random empowering fantasies for teenage girls.
The overall
impression is that Clarke fell in love with the structure and tried to fill it
up, puzzle like, maybe using leftover ideas from aborted project, without
considering that a structure without substance is like a frame without a
picture.
