Nobel Son
Alan Rickman has bits of scenery stuck between his teeth – and that’s some of the best stuff in the film
Tags: Misc DVD 2009 Categories: DVD/TV Reviews, Reviews
Posted by Daniel "monk" Pelfrey on Jun 22nd, 2009
The opening sequence of Nobel Son is quite gruesome, which I wasn’t expecting in the least. From what I understood about the film, it was a “darkly comic” tale of some sort, and the cast is highly intriguing (Alan Rickman, Mary Steenburgen, Danny DeVito, and Bill Pullman – cameos by Ted Danson and Ernie Hudson). I try to stay “spoiler free” when going into a movie, so I didn’t realize that there would be the graphic depiction of a thumb being removed as part of a mugging. I almost turned the movie off right there as it went on far too long and was much more graphic than necessary. Nobel Son isn’t supposed to be a horror film, so why do this?
The general plot (and this isn’t much of a spoiler) is that Alan Rickman is a professor that is cheating on his wife, Mary Steenburgen. Their son (Bryan Greenberg) is a PhD student who isn’t having a great string of luck. Things don’t change when the “not so good” professor wins the Nobel Prize.
Nobel Son has on overall plot of kidnapping and a dysfunctional family. There’s quite a bit of “dark” but not as much of the “comic” in the film. Much of the humoristic opportunities come from the professor, which Alan Rickman portrays very well. Unfortunately, he isn’t given a heck of a lot to deal with. The script doesn’t really seem to fulfill its potential.
As a drama Nobel Son does a decent job, but the subject matter has been tackled before to much greater effect in countless other films. So what does this film really have to offer? Well, there is a scene involving Mary Steenburgen, a gun and a telephone that is outright hilarious. Alan Rickman is a complete jerk in the film and is fun to watch. The story itself has a few decent twists in it, but ultimately it falls flat because it isn’t a thriller, and the comedic touches fall flat.
On DVD we get a 15 minute behind the scenes featurette which is a little more substantive than the usual fluff we get, which is nice, but it doesn’t salvage the film as a whole. A few deleted scenes with optional commentary are present. Even if they were folded back in to the film they wouldn’t have saved the film. There is also an audio commentary featuring some of the cast and crew, but I’ll be honest – I didn’t listen to it. I couldn’t sit through the film a second time.
If you’re a fan of the actors, this might be worth a rental. Nobel Son just doesn’t match up to its goal of being… well, much of anything.
| What Works | Score |
|---|---|
|
+ Good cast + Decent plot twists |
2.0 |
| What Doesn't | |
|
- Not funny - Graphic thumb removal (and completely unnecessary) - Not tense |
|
| Under the Shrink-wrap | |
| Can we get a docter in here? The script is crashing! Too late... | |
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Tags: Misc DVD 2009
Posted by Daniel "monk" Pelfrey on Jun 22nd, 2009 and is filed under DVD/TV Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.
