VividSimon
Simply Perfect
Salubfoto
It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.
Verity Robins
Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.
Olaf Weyer
First of all let me start with that i am not a supporter of the death penalty so you don't believe this would reflect on my rating.Spoilers. I gave this movie a low rating, because it's characters behaviors make no sense, no sense at all. Let me start with the female prisoner on death row. Let's go right into her shoes and speak in her voice, let us choose to say "I": Year back, in a car accident, i caused my sisters blindness and made it impossible for her, to ever have children. I feel guilty. I deserve to suffer. I deserve to pay. She hates me and rightly so. It so happens i am confused with someone who has abducted and murdered a child. I have been sentenced and will die on the electric chair.Do you buy this? I don't. Then perhaps you buy this: But i happen to know that my sister has abducted the child to keep it for herself. That child is still alive and i am the only one who knows. If i die, at least my sister i made suffer so much can be a happy mother. Okay let's say i am buying this. Let's say i find no way to commit suicide because of my deep guilt. I am simply to stupid to kill myself and spent years and years waiting to go to the electric chair. But i don't tell my lawyer to quiet trying to safe my life, appealing to the governor for instance, because that would make to much sense.Okay, let's stretch this a little further. Let's say I KNOW what's going on. I know that my sister and her husband have abducted that child. I want my sister to be happy with that child and i keep my mouth shut. Let them think i abducted that child, yeah, with my death, no one will know. Do you buy this? Can guilt be that blinding that i could forgive a sister, a child abductor and therefore an even bigger monster than the accused? I don't by into this a second.But let's say i do. Now there this guy (main character) visiting me. I want my sister to forgive me (why would i want my sister to forgive, if i don't even forgive myself?!?!) so i give that guy a letter for my sister. Why do i give that guy a letter for my sister, a sister that has vanished from the face of the earth (for her own good, as i must believe), why do i make him bringing her in the spotlight most likely, with the media so much interested in me and my affairs (something that never happens in the movie but this woman should fear of course), would i do that, no i would'nt i would want her to be forgotten. And the guy goes digging of course, because i send him digging.My lawyer should have gone digging also, but luckily my lawyer is stupid, she doesn't know how find my sister, but this guy does. Why do i believe this guy can, were even my lawyer can't?I could go on forever. The story of this movie total BS. And i hate it for it. I hate it, because there is a great, great story buried here in a totally screwed up screenplay. Even worse, this story has no moral spine. What is it about? Is it about guilt and paying, about guilt and paying over price, is it about redemption, about justice? A story needs a single moral core that makes you feel strongly. If you wanna know what i am talking about, watch "A Simple Plan" you can feel it in EVERY minute and it will give you that good old catharsis. This one, it will leave you confuse and empty :/Three stars for the acting and good atmospheric direction. For the story, well, one of the cases were writing must dump his screenplay and start FRESH at the drawing board. All elements are in place. There are just to many of them. Rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. Gee, i HATE laziness!
stewball99
Listed on IMDb under the primary title of Return to Sender (2004) by pretty much unknown to me Danish director, Bille August (except for The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones), is about a woman on death row who is going to let herself be executed in order to protect some one else. Excellent performances by Danish stunner, Connie Nielson (the reason I rented the movie) who never looked better than here in understated prison makeup, and Aidan Quinn (as a letters from death row inmates bounty hunter) in a tight script that starts off like it's going to be an evils of capital punishment vehicle, but turns into something else, which I can only call the value of truth without giving too much away.It was only released in the US on DVD last November, but set here and filmed here and in Denmark. There aren't any external reviews in English, and only one review on IMDb that panned it. I'd have gone to see this in the theater. 7+/10.
dc_follies
Return to Sender, a.k.a. Convicted, is almost imperfect. The one good thing about this particular film was that I was never bored. That being said, the reviews that hail this movie as a low-budget success may not have watched the same movie that I saw.Rather than write a review and tell you what happens and what works and doesn't work, I will simply comment that nothing works. There are plot holes in this movie that you can drive a semi through. The acting in the film is not very good, although that may be a result of a script so poorly worded that it could have been ghost written by George Lucas. There was no need for exceptional sets or costumes for this particular movie and everything seemed appropriate. Did I mention that there were some plot holes? By the end of the movie, you are wondering how a blind guy can be such a good shot with a shotgun, why Kelly Preston trusts Aidan Quinn, why she would fall asleep the night before her client is supposed to be killed, how Aidan Quinn can drive 400 miles in such a short time with a car that keeps breaking down during the rest of the movie, why Aidan Quinn didn't by a fifth instead of a bunch of nips, etc.With all that being said, this is certainly a B-movie, and a terrible one at that. The unfortunate thing is that it just isn't bad enough to be good. If you value your time, please let this serve as a public service message to stay away from this one.
henriquesousa
I'm just writing to alert and remind everybody what really can be done with a "low budget" and independent movie like I think this one is.I love this movie, it's story, the characters, the performances of the actors. It's all great.It has a fantastic ending and I recommend everyone to see this movie.I really think that this type of picture should have more support for being done. It's the "simple" stories like this one that demonstrate the true beauty of the cinema and not the blockbusters that the main industry continues to support.I'm not saying that those shouldn't be done, because their fun.I just think that sometimes and more often, they should support the so called low budget movies so that great, fantastic, human, and simple stories like what this movie represents could come out and be seen by all the people.The fact is that with the low advertisement that is made to this type of movies, at least in my country (I presume that in the States it shouldn't be much more), only the true cinema "buffs" get the chance to find out about them and see them, and not the common person, as it should be from the start.If you really love cinema, don't forget to see this movie, because it's one of those few movies that ends and makes you keep remind about them, the plot, the simultaneous complexity and simplicity of the characters, and everything else for a long time.
