Wordiezett So much average

Steineded How sad is this?

FuzzyTagz If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

AshUnow This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

film_ophile Oh how i wish i could save people from watching this film. It is sooooo cheesy, soo over the top, i wanted to laugh, as in a serge leone film, but unfortunately the director here was dead serious. arggggh. felt like a series of commercials. ALL it had going for it, and I mean ALL, was some beautiful scenery shots including some great Roman buildings. Other than that, if you are a sophisticated film goer,you will buck at the melodramatic schmaltz (both of the repeated shots of bloody murders, the repetitive slow motion shots of bloody deaths, and the light-filtering-in-the gauzy- child's- bedroom shots with the vaseline- coated lens.) Fortunately I could fast forward through all the stupid predictable dreck.If I save one person from watching this, i will feel so much better.

arzewski Although from a cinematography the production is good, the story and the actors are in doubt. First the story: it is about a kid from a crime family in the deep south that escapes from a deeply agrarian society to the heavily services-oriented north. Well, sorry to tell you, but the deep south as it is mythologized in the Godfather movies, doesn't exist anymore. Everybody has a cellphone now, nobody wants to be a Sheppard anymore, everybody wants to have an office job. The story is highly simplistic and idiomatic, kind of a cute story of a sweet looking kid with bad guys around him. Then the actors: the parents of the kidnapped child are "acting" the part that it is so obvious. When they see the child's school backpack, the knee to it, pick it up, and embrace it. So obvious, that it is classic "B" movie, and so predictable, more for a melodrama aired in soap-opera afternoons. Even how the director directed the shots has some unnatural feel: when the kid emerges from the crypt in the cemetery, he is made to turn his head slightly and then express surprise to discover there is a vehicle. It is as if the kid didn't have peripheral vision. Such scene direction by putting emphasis on frontal screen scape is typical of television direction of simple and uncomplicated easy-to-do productions. To have it here just shows how simplistic that was. But it was the only time it happened, otherwise, the other scenes are more dynamic

Gerald A. DeLuca (Plot spoilers ahead.) Violence erupts in a shepherd's field in the Italian region of Calabria. Several men are shot and killed. Later the entire family of the men responsible for the slaughter is itself brutally wiped out in a revenge massacre, except for the young Vito, hiding under the mattress of a bed. He spends the rest of the movie evading his family's murderers, who need to get him out of the way.Vito realizes his own family was part of a kidnapping crime involving a young boy (son of wealthy Sienese parents). The two murderous and murdered crime families had clashed over the issue. The kidnapped child has been killed, but the surviving criminals still want to collect the ransom, asserting that the child is alive. Vito runs away, on foot, by train and truck, any way he can, seeks sanctuary with a relative in Rome (and his girlfriend), until he too is killed. He is questioned by the police, sent to a safe haven, apprehended by a gang member, escapes, continues his noble quest to seek the parents of the slain boy, to tell them what happened, to return to them the ransom money he had found, to tell them not to pay a ransom because their son is dead. At heart he is engaged in a quest to seek new loving replacement parents, to become a substitute son to "replace" the son the Sienese couple has lost. He finds the family's home, with information found in the kidnapped child's bookbag. He barges into the house. The lost child's mother (Francesca Neri) finds this young intruder, takes a liking to the lad, going so far as tenderly bathing the boy and outfitting him with her missing son's clothes. The father (Jacques Perrin) refuses to believe his boy is dead, and negotiates with those still seeking the ransom. This final confrontation between father and criminals causes Vito to be nearly killed…but because of him the villains are subsequently snuffed out by the police in a final violent shootout.Vito dreams of a world where all can live in harmony, children are safe, and blood feuds are unknown. Would that were so. This is a beautifully made film with moments of great excitement and tension and sudden bursts of extreme violence and slaughter that look like out-takes from Sam Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch." Nevertheless, there is a tenderness at the core of the film, which is often very lyrical, sometimes excessively so in long-winded dreamy evocations that pop up from time to time…and at the ending. In short, it's a good thriller, with a humane dimension, on a relatively rare topic, the Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta and its record of child-kidnappings.Performances are uniformly convincing with the remarkable Manuel Colao as the sweetly poetic and shrewdly cautious youngster. Jacques Perrin and Francesca Neri as the kidnapped kid's parents are perfect, and Federico Pacifici is frightening as the deranged scarfaced killer. The direction by Carlo Carlei, whose first film this was, is top-notch. I used to show this film to high school students of Italian, despite the R-rating (for violence) and it invariably went over very well with the teen audiences. It is of interest to note that the 2003 Italian film "I'm Not Scared" ("Io non ho paura") by Gabriele Salvatores, has a story with a number of similarities to this one.

eelpie Jtur has a fair point, you could add that the picture never shows how young Vito obtains the address of his goal---but this is a parable, not a New Realism movie with peasants employed as actors. The most striking feature of this highly cinematic picture is that for the whole 101 minutes it has little dialogue. You could write the lines on a couple of pages. It cuts to the chase in the first 30 seconds, and never stops. At the climactic moment, when the young hero bursts into speech for the first time, putting his own life on the line and thereby redeeming his whole murdered criminal family, it has marvellous dramatic, emotional and philosophical impact, nobly underlined by the literary epitaph. Somehow, I can't see the Disney organisation taking on a big issue and dramatically working out its theme in this way. Flight of the Innocent is so well structured. Every 10 minutes, there is a plot point, and it certainly has no "sagging centre"---an exceptional achievement in any picture. The boy just runs and runs and runs, until he is in the arms of---well, don't let's spoil the story, because this is a passionate statement about a genuine horror of southern Italian life, and well worth seeing.