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4.3.2.1 Blu-ray Review (1 Viewer)

Kevin EK

Reviewer
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4.3.2.1 is an odd movie to see suddenly appearing on the home theater scene.  It’s a low-budget British action dramedy originally released in the UK in 2010.  It presents a Rashomon-style look at a single weekend in the lives of four women and how they are coincidentally involved in a major jewel heist in London.  And you’d think that this would make for a really interesting movie.  Sadly, it does not.  What we get here is mostly just reheated material and inexplicable cameos and what finally comes across as four separate movies existing within one.  Even the few moments we’re given with Kevin Smith isn’t enough to bail the situation out.  The Blu-ray presents the movie as best it can in HD picture and sound, but there really isn’t enough movie here to justify even the rental.



4.3.2.1


Studio: Universal/Magna Films/Pinewood Studios/Molinare/Unstoppable Entertainment/Retro-Juice

Year: 2010

Length: 1 hr 57 mins

Genre:  Action/Drama/Multiple Perspectives/British


Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1

BD Resolution and Codec: 1080p, (VC-1 @ 30 mbps)

Audio:  English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (@ an average 2.0 mbps)

Subtitles: English SDH, French, Spanish

Film Rating:  Not Rated (Violence, Nudity, Sexual Content)


Release Date: July 31, 2012



Starring:   Emma Roberts, Tamsin Egerton, Ophelia Lovibond, Shanika Warren-Markland with Helen McCrory, Sean Pertwee, Ben Miller, Alexander Siddig, Michelle Ryan, Eve, Mandy Pantinkin, Kevin Smith and Noel Clarke


Written by: Noel Clarke

Directed by: Noel Clarke and Mark Davis


Film Rating: 2/5


“4 3 2 1

Earth Below Us

Drifting Falling

Floating Weightless

Calling Calling Home…”

-Major Tom, as immortalized by Gale Boetticher



4.3.2.1 sounds on its face like another Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, but the actual movie just doesn’t live up to even its boxcover.  In short, the movie takes us through a single weekend in the lives of four young friends – dealing with how each of them is touched by a major jewel robbery.   The movie’s style is to take the viewer along with each of the four for the weekend, and then double back to the beginning to follow the next character.  On paper, this is a good idea.  In execution, we seem to be watching four separate movies, each of which has its own style and emphasis.  The final conclusion makes extremely little sense, and may lead to the viewer slapping their forehead in frustration with the whole matter. 


SPOILERS HERE.  DO NOT READ THIS PARAGRAPH UNLESS YOU’VE ALREADY SEEN THE MOVIE, OR DO NOT MIND.   The movie starts out, provocatively enough, with what appears to be a midnight suicide attempt on the Westminster Bridge in London.  A disturbed girl, Shannon (Ophelia Lovibond) is standing on the edge, holding a handful of diamonds, clearly about to jump.  A car pulls up, carrying three other women:  Kerrys (Shanika Warren-Markland), Jo (Emma Roberts) and Cassandra (Tamsin Egerton), all of whom are showing signs of having been in various scrapes and accidents.  Kerrys levels a gun at Shannon and demands the diamonds.  Shannon suddenly slips out of view and the movie rolls the clock back to the beginning – two days earlier.   The movie establishes the four women as friends and further establishes that they have separate weekend plans.  After a few moments of the women chatting in a café and foiling a criminal in the act, the movie then shows the women getting jostled by fleeing gang members, one of whom knocks them down and scatters the contents of their bags, including a note meant for Shannon.  As the women regroup, we see the note go into someone else’s bag, and we also realize that the criminals have apparently dropped an item with them.  The women split up, not realizing what has happened, and we’re off to the idea of following each of them for about twenty minutes.


MORE SPOILERS:  The first person we follow is Shannon, and true to her point of view in that opening moment, which will come much later in the story, she’s living a depressing life.  The camera follows her home where her mother is leaving her father – something she apparently explained to Shannon in that note.  Shannon’s gloomy personality controls this segment, which is consumed by her guilt over having had an abortion and exacerbated by her parents.  Her interactions with her friends are all pre-occupied with the feeling that they secretly don’t like or trust her.  Of course, the movie keeps having her not ask people key questions that would solve these mysteries…  During the segment, she somehow, improbably winds up with a can of crisps that actually holds a bag of diamonds from a major heist and is being hunted by the people who stole it – particularly an only slightly non-bionic Michelle Ryan.  By the end of the segment, we’re not surprised that she wanted to hurl herself off the bridge.   The movie then backtracks and gives us the story of Cassandra.  And now we’re in a completely different movie.  Cassandra is a budding classical pianist who has a weekend audition in New York City, where her parents haplessly send her.  Of course, she’s also planning to hook up with some guy there who she has never spoken with face to face and has only met online via chat.  Before the viewer can finish yelling “You IDIOT!” she has flown to NYC and discovered that something much more stupid is going on.  The tone here is mostly comic – with actress Tamsin Egerton being put into increasingly silly situations and playing off comic appearances by Mandy Pantinkin as the teacher holding the audition, and Kevin Smith as a messenger who engages her in conversation on the plane.  Along the way, Cassandra finds both Shannon’s note, and that she’s carrying a diamond from that early collision.


MORE SPOILERS:  The movie then switches gears to follow Kerrys.  In the first minute of this segment, it becomes obvious this will be a lesbian family dramedy.  A big part of the story is about how Kerrys’ family doesn’t support her the way she wishes, and how she fights with her stepbrother.  There is actually a nice part of this about her interaction with her stepfather (Alexander Siddig), but the movie derails this by turning a big part of that into a joke.  The Kerrys part of the story culminates with her crashing her stepbrother’s car into Jo’s workplace.   The final segment ties the rest together.  This segment follows Jo, whose weekend is taken up with working shifts at a mini-mart, where the assistant manager (Noel Clarke) is clearly part of the gang we’ve been seeing throughout the movie, and part of the diamond heist.  By the end of this segment, it’s clear that all of the women except Shannon are now fairly well aware of what has been happening as regards the diamonds, which they now know Shannon is holding.  One more agreeable part of the film is that the segments after Shannon’s have clarified that each case where she assumed that her friends were being nasty was actually a different matter that had nothing to do with her.


FINAL SPOILERS:  The movie brings the women back together with the near-suicide on the bridge.  Of course, the movie isn’t about to have Shannon jump, and it goes even farther to show that she didn’t even drop the diamonds when she slipped.  The movie then jumps ahead to indicate that the girls are getting reward money for returning the diamonds, and presents them making a trip together to the US.  (I don’t mind them showing Virgin Atlantic Airlines twice, but how are we to think these girls could afford Upper Class fares across the Atlantic, when we’ve seen their living situations?)  And the movie can’t resist one last bizarre twist – something that should jump at any viewer who’s ever been in the close quarters of a plane cabin.  It’s not just that one of the major villains is somehow on the plane, only a few seats away from the girls – it’s that the girls are oblivious of this in spite of her having directly threatened two of them.   This, indeed, is one of those moments for which the “TV Brick” was created over 30 years ago.


4.3.2.1 will be released on Blu-ray and standard definition this week. The Blu-ray holds just the movie in high definition and a featurette that includes all the usual back-patting.



VIDEO QUALITY  4/5


4.3.2.1 is presented in a 1080p VC-1 2.35:1 transfer that accurately presents the movie in all its glory.  There’s some intentional grit to the look and a good variety of flesh tones.  Black levels for the many night exterior scenes look solid.



AUDIO QUALITY  4/5


4.3.2.1 is presented in an English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix that mostly just deals with the dialogue in the front channels and the music in the surrounds.  There’s some ambience here and some cleverness to show when characters are drugged or drunk by bending the audio along with the visuals. 



SPECIAL FEATURES   1 ½/5


The Blu-ray presentation of 4.3.2.1 comes with bookmarking and a single featurette about the making of the movie.


My Scenes – The usual Blu-ray bookmarking feature is available here, allowing the viewer to set their own bookmarks throughout the film.


The Making of 4.3.2.1 (22:19, 480p, Anamorphic) – This is the only featurette on the disc.  It’s actually fairly in-depth in terms of talking to all of the cast members and to the two directors about the project.  They’re clearly all very pleased with themselves and the movie, and there are plenty of mutual compliments.


Subtitles are available for the film and the special features, in English, Spanish and French. A full chapter menu is available for the film.



IN THE END...


4.3.2.1 is not the rollicking, gritty action amalgam its boxcover and preview would lead you to think it is.  It’s a much less interesting affair, with only a few brief moments here and there where things occasionally go to a meaningful place.  The best performances come from a few scattered cameos in what are essentially four separate short films contained within the one movie.  The Blu-ray offers good high definition picture and sound and one fairly thorough featurette, but there really isn’t enough movie here to justify a rental or a purchase.


Kevin Koster

July 30, 2012.



Equipment now in use in this Home Theater:


Panasonic 65” VT30 Plasma 3D HDTV – set at “THX” picture mode

Denon AVR-3311Cl Receiver

Oppo BDP-93 Blu-ray Player

PS3 Player (used for calculation of bitrates for picture and sound)

5 Mirage Speakers (Front Left/Center/Right, Surround Back Left/Right)

2 Sony Speakers (Surround Left/Right – middle of room)

Martin Logan Dynamo 700 Subwoofer

 

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