Diagonaldi Very well executed

Cubussoli Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Tayyab Torres Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

Josephina Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

Sankari_Suomi Two young boys run away from home because of reasons. One of them is mildly intelligent; the other has something very wrong with his brain. We know this because he's always eating random stuff and vomiting his guts out. Throughout the course of the movie he eats: insects, mud, paint, a bunch of other stuff I can't remember. None of this is ever explained.As tensions between the brothers become unbearable, the film staggers towards its outlandishly unrealistic and excruciatingly dull final scene. I got less than I bargained for, which is pretty impressive considering how far my expectations had fallen by this point.I rate Undertow at 9.99 on the Haglee Scale, which works out as an vomitous 3/10 on IMDb.

Wuchak After viewing David Gordon Green's awesome "Snow Angels" (2007), easily one of the greatest dramas ever filmed, I decided I'd better give his previous film "Undertow" another chance. I'm glad I did because 2004's "Undertow" is the type of film that gets better with repeat viewings.The story revolves around two boys living with their father in rural Georgia near Savannah (where the film was shot), trying to eke out a living off the land. Chris is about 16 and Tim around 10; both manifest their grief over their dead mother and the challenges of their destitute isolation in different ways: Chris gets in trouble with the law, while Tim strangely seems obsessed with consuming non-edible items. Their father's brother comes to visit and seems affable enough, but there's a wild, sinister glint in his eyes. No wonder since he's frothing with hostility and greed. Havoc ensues."Undertow" is a bit reminiscent of Terrence Malick's "Days of Heaven" (1978) in that both are realistic dramas focusing on youths in rural areas and both offer a dreamy viewing experience. Each try hard to enchant with their movie magic. Unlike "Days", however, "Undertow" is rooted in the Southern Gothic genre. Of the two, I favor "Undertow".It goes without saying that these types of arty films aren't for everyone. Those bred on modern "blockbusters" will likely find "Undertow" dull, meandering and pointless. And, I admit, I myself wasn't all that impressed the first time I watched it. I didn't hate it; I just didn't "get" it, if you know what I mean. I'm glad I gave it a second (and third) chance, however, because "Undertow" succeeded in pulling me in under its spell, so to speak. Maybe you just have to be in the right mode for a film of this ilk.The "dreamy" quality mentioned above is facilitated by Philip Glass's mesmerizing score. It's simple and repetitive, but greatly effective. Like the movie, it grows on you. In fact, I've gone to the closing credits a few times just to enjoy this brilliant composition.Being a Southern Gothic drama/thriller, "Undertow" has a cool Southern ambiance. Other films that are successful in this manner come to mind: "The General's Daughter", "Ode to Billy Joe", "I Walk the Line" (with Gregory Peck, 1970), "Mississippi Burning", "Squirm", "The Man in the Moon" and "The Skeleton Key". If you have a taste for these types of films (and "Days of Heaven") you'll likely appreciate "Undertow".Kristen Stewart has a small role in the first half hour.The film runs 108 minutes.FINAL WORD: It may not strike you on the first viewing but "Undertow" is a mesmerizing Southern Gothic drama/thriller; in some ways brilliant. I'm presently only giving it 8/10 because its point is elusive. What's it all mean? Regardless, "Undertow" is one of those films that gets better and better with each viewing, sort of like songs you didn't like at first but ultimately become all-time favorites. GRADE: B+

MBunge This movie would not end. It just kept going on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on. I began to wish that my house would catch fire so I would have an excuse to stop watching it.This interminable tale starts out with John Munn (Dermot Mulroney) and his two sons. Chris (Jaime Bell) is a teenage delinquent with a crush on a neighbor girl. Tim (Devon Alan) is the brainy kid brother with a 1970s era Bee Gees haircut who makes himself sick by eating any appalling garbage he can get his hands on. They live out in the sticks and don't interact much with the rest of the world. Then John's brother Deel (Josh Lucas) shows up. Deel has gotten out of prison and is looking for work. John asks him to stay and help look after his boys. Deel agrees, but the reason he's really there is to find the old coins their father had. He finds the coins, things go terribly wrong and the rest of the movie involves Chris, Tim and Deel wandering aimlessly and pointlessly through the countryside in one of the most boring stretches of film I've ever seen or even imagined.There are so many scenes in Undertow that are so dumb and so purposeless they could only exist to stretch this story out to legitimate movie-length. We get to watch John Munn eat cake! We get to see him smoke a pipe! We get to listen to Tim prattle on about chiggers! We observe Chris and Tim performing chores for a black couple! And we also get to experience the slowest speed chase in the history of anyone chasing anybody! I am not exaggerating when I say that 90% of the second half of this film is useless crud. It serves no function within the story and it has no greater thematic or emotional significance for the audience.Compounding the awesome lack of meaning and direction in this story is that these characters talk about their emotions like they're guests on the Dr. Phil show. These people are portrayed as unsophisticated country folk, yet they speak as though they've been in therapy since they were born. There is nothing in this story that is left under the surface. Every last, little, possible nuance or subtlety is just splayed out in front of the audience, as though the filmmakers were worried that this film might be a bit too smart for people. It ain't.Josh Lucas is the only actor who manages to give an even halfway decent performance, and he's stuck with a character who stops making sense halfway through the film. Mulroney and his two young co-stars are just stiffs. Though to be fair, it's not like the story is asking them for more and they fail to deliver. The characters are just blocks of wood, so I suppose their uninspired work may have been a case of good acting in crappy roles.Finally, there's a lot of inexplicably arty direction going on here. Something will happen and that image will be repeated again and again. The film will flash to negative for a second or the image will freeze while we still hear people talking. Slow motion is used, not for some important moment in the story, but for a homeless chick walking. That's all she was doing. Walking. And they put her in slow-mo! None of these fancy tricks mean anything to the story or to how the audience is supposed to perceive it. I think the director simply thought they looked really cool. He was wrong.Undertow starts out like it's a "family coming together" movie, runs into a big moment of melodrama and then mutates into this ponderous, tiring, idiotic drool. I can understand why someone may have thought the first half of this film was worth making. I cannot, for the life of me, figure out what went wrong with the second half.

RainDogJr Last week I saw my second David Gordon Green film; the name David Gordon Green wasn't very familiar to me before seeing, back in October 2008, the Apatow production Pineapple Express and it wasn't familiar to me after seeing it. It became familiar when I began to read stuff about Undertow and about Gordon Green's first feature film George Washington (that is part of the Criterion Collection) and then it was when I realized that the director I really wanted to start watching was the man behind Pineapple Express. Undertow is the only title of Gordon Green available on R4 DVD (not even Pineapple Express has been released on R4 DVD) but anyway, this film has some scenes that alone make of it a worth watching one, it has amazing acting, it is something I definitely would like to watch again in a near future. Billy Elliot is a film that I really disliked when I saw it years ago, if you ask me now I certainly don't recommend it at all but if you ask about the other two films with Jamie Bell in that I had seen before seeing Undertow you will get my highest recommendations, you know I loved both Dear Wendy and Peter Jackson's King Kong, both with a terrific Jamie Bell so for me Jamie Bell is not Billy Elliot and since I also think Undertow is a fine film Bell can be also Chris Munn. And Bell is great here, doing his very first performance of an American character yet I think Josh Lucas, as the uncle of Bell's character, steals the film. Undertow is about family, about isolation, the isolation of a family in a rural part of Georgia. The first sequence with Chris, Chris' father John (Dermot Mulroney) and Chris' younger brother Tim (Devon Alan) all together happens after John heard about what Chris did now (the opening credits sequence is a great one and is Chris running like hell, trying not to bee caught by the father of his love interest), about why Chris is now at the police station, is a sequence with John certainly angry, he got he call from the police in a day that was supposed to be about Tim, was Tim's birthday and, in words of Tim, was supposed to be "a lot of fun, a good time with you and dad and me". Soon Josh Lucas' character appears, as I said Lucas is AMAZING and he steals the film as John's brother Deel who after being in prison found John and his family. There's always the interest to know more, at first we get to know that after John's wife died John took the kids and moved to the place where they all now live in and that John's wife was first Deel's girlfriend. Is typical what we get with the character Deel, he will stay with them and look after the kids and is classic the actions of Deel specially with Chris, you know Deel is like "it's like living in a fishbowl being stuck here like a workhorse" when we have before Chris saying to his father "you never let me leave this place, we can't even have friends. What can of birthday is it with just the three of us?" so I clear what is the "role" of Deel, trying to give the kids some elbow room and, in words of John, "he came to find me for a reason". We get to know about those coins of my title ("those coins are greed" is a line of John) in a conversation between John and Deel and for once it seems like something that is just not quite relevant, I mean is Deel bringing to the talk with John the Mexican coins that his father stole from a museum and that were supposed to give both him and John richness and is John saying that those coins are lost since long time ago. Tim is a strange character, he is certainly not a common 10 year old boy and as Dell says to Tim he is smarter than most of the kids of his age. There's something to make us feel worried, Tim has health problems, pretty much he eats all kind of stuff but food. Tim is the one who reveals to Deel and then to us that his father has the treasure and later on, while Deel is trying to find the coins Tim will ask about them to his father, John tells him what his father told him, pretty much what Tim and Chris hear from their father is that those coins are cursed, they can't use them, "those coins are greed", those coins for Deel represents what belongs to him but was taken away from him by his own brother. Undertow has two parts, the second one place the boys simply running like hell, there's no time for laments, there's no time to sort of get what's going on, how their life changed completely, is all a fine piece of film, great performances, superb editing, a story told to us as it was told… recommended. Can't wait to see more of David Gordon Green.