Protraph Lack of good storyline.

Pluskylang Great Film overall

Asad Almond A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

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

Wizard-8 The cable channel Home Box Office has made a name for itself by making a number of high quality movies. "Blind Side", however, is one of HBO's rare misses. You can tell that HBO doesn't seem to think it's as worthy as its other movies, because the DVD for the movie (made by them) has one of the worst looking transfers I've seen in a long time. Where did this go wrong? The actors are not at fault - they are clearly trying. It's the script that's at fault. It's not that I object to the central story being very familiar, but how it plays out. The movie moves very slowly, when there should have been snappier and the situation more tense for the protagonists much earlier in the game. And the climax involves (sigh) a punch-up instead of something more clever. However, if you want to see the ridiculous sight of Ron Silver in a sex scene, or the equally silly sight of managing to hold his own in a fist fight, this movie will do nicely.

mysteriesfan This was undoubtedly one of the worst movies I have ever seen. To see talented, intelligent actors like Ron Silver, Rebecca DeMornay, and Mariska Hargitay caught up in it was all the more appalling. The best that can possibly be said about the film is that DeMornay looks beautiful on screen. I cannot discuss how dismally bad a movie this is without summarizing what happens. I try to stick the main story line, without giving away certain details.The movie begins with a "happy scene" of husband and wife Doug and Lynn Kaines (Silver, DeMornay) wrapping up a Mexican vacation, preparatory to moving their specialty furniture-making business south of the border. They head home to the U.S., driving to the border at night on a lonely, isolated road. Disaster strikes when a man staggers out of the fog in front of their car. The man bounces off of the windshield and into a ditch. After checking to see that he looks dead, with his "brains coming out of his head," the couple drives off.There follows nothing more than a steady stream of cliché, melodramatic, and extreme ways to torment these two people. It is all done for cheap effect, without any larger purpose or meaning. It is unpleasantness for unpleasantness sake. Plot details about the killing in Mexico, which are injected at various points, seem almost beside the point.First, there is a trumped-up scene at the border where guards become hostile and then just walk away. Next, the couple bickers, has stagey, protracted nightmares or daydreams, and generally wallows in guilt about the hit-and-run. For example, a scene with the couple behind the wheel while their vehicle goes through a car wash drags on endlessly, capped by the ugly image of a somehow still-bloody eyebrow becoming dislodged from the windshield wiper.Then, mysterious hulking stranger Jake Shell (Rutger Hauer) arrives. He has vacant expressions and vague, clumsy speech that are supposed to be sinister but quickly become a mannered, exaggerated, annoying, and time-wasting gimmick. Shell aggressively tries to insinuate himself into their home and business by dropping hints, over and over again, that he has come up from Mexico and knows about the accident.The couple makes tedious, pointless attempts to drive him away, such as a wasted scene with a lawyer, or to keep him close at hand. Apparently for the sheer sake of it, Shell escalates his activities to whatever sick, vicious, sadistic behavior the writers can think of next to throw in with the kitchen sink. When the couple's showroom employee Hargitay, acting like a ditzy moron, goes with Shell to his apartment on a date, he brutalizes her during exaggerated "kinky" sex, causing her to quit. Shell makes hammy, "weird" advances toward DeMornay, including surprising her in the sauna. Her pregnant character loses her baby. Silver is beaten up. In a particularly degrading scene, Shell helps himself to a videotape of the couple making love and then taunts them about it."Happy music" returns when it looks like Shell has accepted money to leave. Not for long. More advances, abuse, and beatings. Shell invades the Kaines' home, with a floosie in tow, trashes the house, shorts out the wiring on the sauna trying to raise the temperature to boiling hot, and forces the Kaines to listen all night to his raucous sex.The last 15 minutes degenerates into nothing but a continuous brawl and shoot-out. Shell becomes a Frankenstein monster that nothing can stop -- not punches, not objects broken over his head, not a fall from a second-story window, not a wound to the chest, not being immolated by flames, almost not by electrocution.In one of the worst scenes I have ever seen in any movie, Shell takes a break from the intimidation and fighting to leave the house momentarily to go to his camper-truck. He returns to the house, framed in the front doorway, lit from the back with what looks like fog all around him, dressed like a cowboy with two six-shooters, the camera often zooming in on his eye next to a bloody gash on his head. Silver and DeMornay have to stand there for humiliating reaction shots. Shell proceeds to fire all around the couple, shattering lamps and windows and setting the house ablaze. When Shell himself is consumed by flames, he goes flailing out to the sauna and dives in. This creates a chance for some final embarrassing lines from DeMornay to Shell, with Silver lying wounded nearby: "You want this?" she says, tearing off one of several layers of clothes, "You afraid of me?" Shell resumes shrieking and firing bullets, even while going into wild convulsions when the couple team up to clumsily and obviously toss an electric lamp into the sauna. Sirens blare in the background (where were the neighbors through all of this?). With the house burning down, the movie fades to the credits, as if to say all the movie leaves behind is a heap of ashes.All of the torment, violence, and sexual content is exploited for nothing more than empty, mindless, voyeuristic shock value. The movie is not even true to its convictions in exploiting the sexual content, which makes it lame and incompetent on that level, too. There are numerous scenes with heavy-handed sexual overtones, but the only nudity (even in the so-called "Unrated" version) is a brief topless shot of the least-known actress, Tara Clatterbuck, in a frivolous scene. Nor is the movie original. It is a cheap formula rip-off of films like Cape Fear.This movie was a tedious, trying, insulting, offensive disaster. That some reviews try to pretend otherwise is a pathetic example of just how low standards have sunk. When the only problem an otherwise breathlessly enthusiastic review sees in a movie like this is that a character calls the couple's Ford Explorer a "jeep," something is terribly wrong.

frheins Blind Side (1993)Sometimes in life, good people under trying circumstances make grim decisions that will, no matter how many years trudge by, will never rise to the level of "excusable." In this thriller directed by "Geoff Murphy," two such people are the husband and wife duo played by "Ron Silver" and "Rebecca De Mornay," respectively. (Duh.) Soon enough, their once in a lifetime moral failing comes back to haunt – and taunt – them, with a horrible vengeance.Traveling north on a deserted road, yet far south of the border, the two small time entrepreneurs on the tail end of a business cum pleasure trip slam headlong into gut wrenching tragedy; more specifically, this dark and foggy night they inadvertently run down a Mexican Policeman, who, for some unknown reason, lurches out of the brush and onto the windshield of their SUV.Having enough decency to stop and verify the lawman is in fact beyond mortal help, the character of the husband aggressively convinces his wife that sticking around and doing the right thing might result in some serious hard time. Not a pleasant prospect, considering that the wife was behind the wheel at the time of the accident, and newly pregnant, to boot.After a tense-ridden crossing of the border, slipping under the noses eyes of suspicious Mexican authorities, they return to their once gratifying life of making and selling pricey furniture. Once a shared calling so pleasantly normal, the love-filled duo are forced to cope as best they can (especially the wife) with their newly acquired burden of guilt. Given time, maybe, they expect the guilt will fade to a tolerable level.Time to heal, regrettably, is cut short.Enter "Rutger Hauer," an ominous figure who shows up at their residence looking, for of all things, a job. Tall, handsome, and flushed with an understated animal magnetism that slowly morphs into something darker and more expressive, one of the first of many cryptic and troubling things that glide past the smoothly folksy tongue and subtly smirking mouth of the stranger is that he, too, has recently come north from Mexico. And, without coming out and saying it directly, somehow, someway, he knows more about the husband and wife's grim misadventure down south than they could ever have imagined anybody, anywhere ever learning.Let the enigmatic game of indirect intimidation, foreboding blackmail and life-shattering violence begin.Sounds like the confection of an appetizing spine-chiller, huh? And it was, mostly.The rub, as I experienced it, was excessiveness. Trimmed 15, maybe 20 minutes, and instead of the drawn-out drama I sort of enjoyed, I might have been treated to a top-notch taut thriller. Excessive celluloid bred redundancy. If Rutger Hauer had dropped one darksome, telling hint, he done dropped a thousand. His slyness got so overplayed, I nearly screamed at my TV "out with what you know and how you know it!" Also, those two or so beatings he administered to Ron Silver's character diminished in impact with each thrashing. Oh, back and forth their joust of machismo went. Throw in the three isolated confrontations between Rutger Hauer and Rebecca De Mornay, face-offs that held the potential for violence, sex or a combination thereof – and . . . well, you know, if I saw it twice, I didn't need to see a second encore.So much of a good thing didn't necessarily equate to a consistently good feature. Nor did it have a chance.Anyway, "Blind Side" ultimately turned out to be a fair to good movie, carried to the finish, barely, by a clever plot line just believable enough, reinforced along the way by stellar acting.(Besides, it certainly beat the two previous DVD's I had to suffer through courtesy of my monthly subscription: weirdo "Electric Glide in Blue," a movie that must have had some significance when it was released three decades ago, when going against the grain meant a little more than hating all things George Bush, and "Bone Daddy," a murder mystery that coincidentally starred Rutger Hauer, which, unfortunately and puzzlingly, was riddled with an illogically unfolding plot and "Bone-Headed" non sequiturs of dialogue.)

Dan Franzen (dfranzen70) Doug and Lynn Kaines (Ron Silver and Rebecca De Mornay), furniture tycoon-wannabes, are in Mexico scouting out a new location for their business. Driving back home, they seemingly strike and kill a man standing in the middle of the road. Frightened, they drive on home. Shortly after they get there, however, Shell (Rutger Hauer) shows up on their doorstep, claiming to have been in Mexico and to be looking for employment. The Kaines, presented to us as everyday people (albeit with money), instantly sense that Shell knows something about the hit-and-run - or does he? They don't know for sure - not at first - but even the possibility of the hulking Hauer being able to hold something over this affluent couple is enough to spook them. Complicating matters is the fact that Lynn's pregnant. So what would YOU do? Charming, handsome ("in an outdoorsy way," Lynn says), eager to please, Shell seems like he wants to fit in - yet he drops hints that he might have been a witness to the accident. Screenwriting being what it is today, we have a pretty good idea things will wind up in the open before too long, but not before the lives of the Kaines are completely ruined. If the lead characters were in their twenties, we'd see Shell try to do something to their parents, but since they're all grown up, Mom and Dad are out of the picture. (Which is not to say that Shell doesn't find someone close to them to harass, of course!) The story gets sillier and sillier as it goes on, but somehow the performances by all three leads keep it afloat. Hauer's doing a role he can pretty much do in his sleep, but he hasn't lost any edge off it. All in all, a fine HBO movie.