6.5/10 Another example of a film where the shills AKA “critics” of Rotten Tomatoes have gotten it wrong, “The Unforgivable” was a film I went into with low expectations but found myself pleasantly surprised, despite some flaws. For full disclosure, I completely forgot that this was based upon a TV series from 2009 entitled “Unforgiven”. Normally, I would have viewed and reviewed that first before checking out this adaptation. A lot of times the quality of a film is based upon how it compares to previous iterations. For example, another Netflix original film, “The Guilty” would be fine unless like me, you had seen the original film, which the newer version is a complete rip off of and adds nothing new to. So for all I know this could be a much worse version than the three episode TV series from over a decade ago. However, just judging this film on its own, disconnected from that series, had me enjoying it far more than I thought I would. Sandra Bullock reminds us why she is an Oscar winner as the entire cast does a great job of playing their roles, with Bullock being the standout. The script does a solid job of getting the audience emotionally connected to the characters and their respective plights. The struggles of getting out of prison and trying to adapt back into society feels authentic here. The pacing works well and I was entertained from start to finish. There is a twist at the end of the film, which ended up being both a positive and negative. It was a positive in that you won’t see it coming and that it completely changes your thoughts and feelings of certain characters that you previously had while watching the film up until that point. On the negative side, the more I thought about the twist the more I realized that is felt pretty unbelievable and unrealistic. How it was dealt with also could have been handled in a much better way. A couple of moments in the film rely too heavily on coincidence and/or convenience which I wasn’t really buying. A daughter in the film just so happens to overhear important, plot altering information from her parents, who stupidly decide to talk about private family matters at full volume in the kitchen, as opposed to outside or behind closed doors in hushed voices. After the daughter easily hears this information, she is also easily able to stumble upon some secret letters which the parents, also stupidly, never locked up and did a half ass job at hiding. Moments like these stripped away believability which previous, stronger scenes worked so hard to establish. The score was also forgettable, despite being co-scored by Hanz Zimmer but the rule with Zimmer has always been that if he scores the film, you can expect a rather high quality score but if he co-scores a film, he tends to phone it in and let the other composer do the heavy lifting. Overall, despite some moments that ruin credibility, a twist that gets less believable the more you think about it and my uncertainty of being able to compare this to the TV series, the rock solid performances, strong pacing, emotional connections and well balanced subplots make this a film worth checking out on Netflix if you keep your expectations in check.
#UnforgivableThatsWhatYouAre / #SisterTact / #TheMomentOfRuth / #ShotGunCaller / #ExtremelyLoud&IncrediblyGrossNegligence / #UnhappyAccidents
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