A Lonely Place to Die

I didn't read up on what this film was about. So at first glance, it looked like a climbing movie (*snore*). What with the title and all, I expected an accident that would leave one climber alone stuck somewhere on a mountain range.

Luckily, this is not what happens.

A group of mountaineers (five to begin with) are out in the Scottish highlands when they stumble upon a little girl that has been kidnapped and kept inside a box underground. They take the girl with them and while a couple head off to take a precarious but short route to the nearest hamlet, the others go off with the girl. Unfortunately for all, the kidnappers are already hot on their heals and have no qualms about killing them off one by one. And this they do.

The kidnappers apparently have been in the business of abducting young children from out of state and making millions off of their parents. Here they are about to meet with a negotiator speaking for the girl's father, when their bargain chip gets snatched up, so their problems are multiple. Nevertheless, they still try to pull off the money handover (without having anything to trade in for it).

In the end, the girl is save (of course, she is), the last remaining heroine is on her way to the hospital and the one surviving kidnapper is captured himself and gets some hands-on treatment from the girl's father and his henchmen.

Quite exciting with casualties falling left and right.

6/10

Captain Phillips

Whoa, that was intense.

This is Tom Hanks at his best. He is simply excellent as the Captain of the MV Maersk Alabama, which in 2009 was taken by a small group of Somali pirates.

When the hijack turned sour for the Somalis on board, thanks to the resourcefulness of Captain Phillips and his crew, they took Phillips hostage and left on the life raft, heading for Somali. The idea was to get 10 million $ in ransom money.

With all the action going on - crew hiding in the engine room, outsmarting the pirates by turning off emergency lights and leaving glass shards by the door for the one barefoot pirate to step in, Navy Seals parachuting onto the scene, military ships and helicopters coming for the rescue - the focus is always on Captain Phillips and his four hijackers. The group is in this small boat, exhausted, thirsty and overcome by cabin fever and none of it ever gets boring.

I don't know if things really went down as they did, but if only half of it did, this Captain Phillips is quite the hero.

Edge-of-your-seat excitement!

8/10

No One Lives

A group of violent criminals (although the level of violence each member is ready to dish out varies) kidnaps a vacationing couple to - what? - kill them? rob them? torture them? Nobody knows for sure.

Then the most violent of the violent group, one Flynn, when searching the freshly obtained car, finds a young woman in the trunk, this one kidnapped herself by the pretty couple (recently considered harmless). Turns out the guy (no names, please!) is a psychopathic asshole who has not only kidnapped the girl in the trunk but apparently also the girl he was with who - rather than spending more time with the psycho - throws herself onto a bowie knife that has been threateningly held against her throat. Both women have been equiped with a sensor by the psycho, placed in their lower belly.

Things get out of hand for our group of ciminals when they find that psycho has escaped from their associate Ethan's watch and is now hunting them. And, as the title and the whipered words of the psycho suggest, "no one lives".

However, this turns out to not be quite true as the orignial kidnapped young woman survives and the psycho walks.

What it lacks in coherent story it makes up in disgust. Kind of meh.

3/10

Riddle

Two high school seniors decide one day that it would be fun to take poor, timid, mentally challenged Nathan out for a joy ride and scaring the hell out of him by playing 'chicken'. After Nathan peed himself as a result (and really, what were they expecting) they stop at a gas station and send him to the bathroom to clean himself up. And then the boy vanishes into thin air.

Jump to three years later. Nathan's sister Holly is now a college student but goes home for the week to help out at the local farmer's market. When an apple drops to the floor and she goes down to retrieve it she catches a glimpse of a pair of shoes that are obviously her little brother's. She follows the man wearing them all the way to nearby Riddle.

It is obvious from the get-go that some of the inhabitants of the all-but-dead town know something about Nathan's disappearance and possibly whereabouts but are not willing to talk. Holly reconnects with a former high school colleague (who just happens to be the Sheriff's daughter and OMG didn't Val Kilmer used to look good whatthehellhappenedthere) and eventually the two idiots that were involved in Nathan's disappearance. (Side note: if you hire actors in their thirties to play kids of 21 years, make sure all of them can pull off that age...it is irritating if a 30 year old looks her age *cough* Diora Baird *cough* but is supposed to be of just-out-of-high-school age.)

Together they break into the Sheriff's office to retrieve the files on Nathan from 3 years back. It is then that they (and we) learn that both, Nathan and Holly, were adopted and their real father stabbed their mothe rto death. As a consequence, the kids were adopted and daddy ended up in an asylum for the criminally insane in, yes, Riddle. It is at this point at the latest that we know who took the boy. After losing the two former high school idiots (death by ax), Holly gets chased by daddy to the insane asylum (yes, sure, crawl into a locked and deserted building when you have all the woods to hide in, or, Idon'tknow, you could run back into town or something) where he tells her that the boy stays with him and she belongs with her mother. Why he doesn't kill her when he has the chance (he did stab the woman, remember) I couldn't say. He chooses to torture her with electric shocks instead, giving Holly the chance to set him on fire.

Yeah, it's crap.

1/10

Forbrydelsen (The Killing) - Season 3

The Killing is back to the form of season 1. There is simply more room for emotional attachment when a family is involved.

Little Emilie is kidnapped and Sarah Lund, teamed up with a new colleague (again) and an old love from Special Branche, take over the case. It appears to be connected to the death of a girl a few years back. The old case was filed as a suicide, but as the kidnapping investigation progresses, and the law enforcement team get led around their noses by the kidnapper, it turns out that the girl was murdered.

The kidnapper of Emilie, daughter of the CEO of the powerful Zeeland Cooperation that has close ties to the Prime Minister (yes, of course, politicians are involved in all this again), is the murdered girl's father. Lund and her troop are forced to investigate on both fronts now and get to the original killer before the kidnapper does.

Privately, Lund is still living by herself and her relationship with her son Mark is more strained than it has ever been. When she sees her son while she is supposed to deliver money to the kidnapper she realizes that he is about to become a father. This shocks her for a moment and she misses the train she was told to get on by the kidnapper. So, all is not well.

After she ends up in bed with her partner from Special Branche, she gets cornered by his wife, which doesn't improve the situation.

In the end, they save the little girl in the nick of time. When Lund realizes who the original killer of the kidnapper's daughter was, she also understands that she has no hard evidence against him and he is unlikely to ever be prosecuted for his crime, at which point she does the worst possible thing she can possibly do. She shoots him.

The season ends with Lund on a plane fleeing to - one assumes - Finland. One also assumes that this might be the end of the series.

7/10