Title – Third Person (2013)

Director – Paul Haggis (Crash)

Cast – Liam Neeson, Olivia Wilde, Adrien Brody, Moran Atias, Mila Kunis, James Franco, Maria Bello, Kim Basinger

Plot – Three love stories take place in Rome, New York and Paris. These peoples stories seemingly interlocking despite the object of time and distance.

 “I need you to face what you can’t face and I need you to tell me the truth”

Review by Eddie on 13/02/2015

Poor old Paul Haggis, ever since his success as a dedicated screenwriter with the likes of Million Dollar Baby and his Oscar winning directional comeback Crash (one of the most backlashed Best Picture winners in Oscar history) he seems to have entered into a creative funk that has seen him direct In the Valley of Elah and the Next Three Days, both financially unsuccessful and mediocre films that have now reached a new low with this Crash wannabe Third Person.

Third Person is the very epitome of a pretentious movie, a long winded self-assured multi character spanning drama that goes on far too long and attempts to wow us with its final reveal. It’s a film with an interesting idea yet not the sense to play it out in an effective manner and it’s a showcase for Haggis’s lost touch behind camera that he can’t illicit any good will from his actors, his story or his characters. Third Person seems intent on being depressing at any given time and while that is not a movie ruining play it doesn’t work here when the script is so bland and situations so unbelievable in many aspects. The story line between Adrien Brody’s seedy businessman Scott and Moran Atias’s feisty mother Monika has to be one of the worst of last year and no amount of quality acting could’ve saved it or the picture as a whole.

While the lead here may be the ever stoic Liam Neeson as troubled writer Michael, Third Person spreads its acting burden across the capable shoulders of Olivia Wilde, Mila Kunis, Adrien Brody, James Franco and bit turns by the likes of Kim Basinger and Maria Bello, yet you wouldn’t say a single one comes out of it on tops although Wilde shows some hidden intensity that showcases a more worthwhile film could well benefit from her presence. How all these people’s lives interact with each other’s is one of the films many frustrating pay offs and it makes you question why the story needed to be told in the way it was, but sadly it feels where the pretention of greatness stems from, you can almost see Haggis licking his directional lips at the thought of more Crash like success.

A dull film that thinks itself to be oh so clever, Third Person is a downright boring movie with a raft of unlikeable and uninteresting characters who occupy a storyline line that consistently fly’s the line between utterly unbelievable through to total boredom. You’re always sitting and waiting for Third Person to go somewhere, anywhere but thank goodness there are moments when people yell or break things as if they didn’t, Third Person would’ve been one of the year’s biggest non-events in a narrative and movie sense. As it stands, it’s just plain old awful.

1 and a half white roses out of 5