Hours

Crap film. Hilariously convenient, poorly scripted, and badly acted. Paul Walker is as wooden as ever and can only pull one face. His wife has just died and he is totally cool with it, even so much as to joke with the canteen guy. Basically his range goes from plain face to smiley face, to shouting. He cannot do anything else, and for a film that relies on his presence alone, it's really noticeable. The film is stupid; when he wants a battery charger, he finds one in minutes. The same goes for food, a drip, a radio, adrenaline shots and, yes...a flare! And he finds all of these in the very short time that he has before he needs to recharge the battery to his daughters' life support machine. Really, really stupid.

The film also seems intent on cramming in as many phrases as possible ("lighting doesn't strike twice", "don't bite the hand that feeds you" among others), which is testament to its bad script. It's so badly written; the guy's wife has just died and the doctor says to him "how did she die?" as if he's talking about last night's game. Then he says "at least you have a child". I mean, who says that?!

The only mildly acceptable scenes are the flashbacks (or pretty much every scene with Genesis Rodriguez), which is where you can see Paul at his best; a happy, jokey lover boy. The dramatic heights that this film requires are certainly not his specialty, and I cannot believe they cast him in the role. He also looks at his watch everytime the timer goes off; just bad acting. Eventually you wouldn't look at the watch timer because you'd know how long was left by the beep.

D