Clive Owen

My wife and I love Netflix.  We regularly populate our movie list with the latest and greatest. Chick flicks for her and action/adventure for me.  Every once in a while however, we’ll throw in movies that catch our attention but we really know nothing about.  Those ones usually get rotated to the bottom of the list. As the time for a pair of movies is about to be shipped, we move to the top the ones that we’ve been anticipating. This week, we forgot to alter our list to ensure we got the good stuff and a pair of almost random movies showed up in the mail.  One of those was Derailed with Clive Owen and Jennifer Aniston.

Due to many years of movie watching, I’ve become rather well clued in as to when a writer intends to throw us off the trail. It may be due to the hints in promotional movie posters or trailers, or just the subtle hints the author so often can’t help but give away in the story. Few movies lately have had as drastic a shift in story paradigm as The Sixth Sense but I found this one to be just as shocking, if not more.

The writer here can’t help himself either. An early line in the movie has the main character talking about the author of a book “seducing” the audience into the narrative before twisting the plot.  It seemed he was telegraphing his moves. Now I’d be watching for the shift in the story. I never saw it coming. Not the first twist, or the second, or any of the many to follow. The first shift, abrupt and shocking, almost eliciting an emotional response. Not in a sad, tearjerking way. No movie before has kept me emotionally vested like this one. I felt heartbroken for the character, then mad at him, then scared for him. It was an awesome ride and the end left me very satisfied. I felt like the mark in a con movie. I had been fooled but I felt less ashamed for being tricked and more at awe at the amazing con.

I really enjoyed this movie.  I just saw that there were a few reviews that rated it less than great, but in my opinion, it was time well spent. If you get an opportunity to see it, I would definetly recommend Derailed.