Notes

Texas Killing Fields Screaming Land

The filmmakers whose works were selected for the 68th Venice Film Festival 2011 are primarily internationally established greats - from Roman Polanski to Johnnie To. Ami Canaan Mann was one of the few unknowns in the selection, but she still has a famous name: She is the daughter of "Heat" director Michael Mann. Now comparing the generations is always a bit unfair - even last year's winner on Lido, Sofia Coppola ("Somewhere") first had to break out of the shadow of her father Francis ("The Godfather"). The apple is then in Ami Mann's first major production, the extremely conventional crime drama "Texas Killing Fields" but fallen a little further from the trunk. Even a prominent cast and the know-how of the father who produced the film are of little help.




Texas City, Texas: A young woman is murdered. The two cops Mike Souder (Sam Worthington) and Brian Heigh (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) are called to the scene. Brian suspects a connection to a series of murders in the outskirts of the small town. In the inhospitable swamp of the so-called Texas Killing Fields, bodies of girls and young women are found again and again. While Brian wants to go on the hunt for the serial killer with Mike's ex-wife Pam (Jessica Chastain), also a police officer, he focuses strictly on the new individual case and quickly has a suspect in Rule (Jason Clarke). Another possible lead emerges when the police stop by the family of runaway Ann (Chloe Moretz), where the sinister Rhino (Stephen Graham) has quartered. solar movie When Anne disappears, events take a dramatic turn ...




"Texas Killing Fields" begins with the often used and in many cases already degenerated phrase "Inspired by real events". In fact, dozens of corpses have been found in the eponymous swamps over decades, but the film's staff and details are so heavily fictionalized that the reference seems a bit gimmicky. It quickly becomes apparent that the man and screenwriter Don Ferrarone seem to draw less from reality than from the similar stories told countless times in film and television. It starts with pairing two dissimilar cops as partners; one, Mike, is a local, and the other, Brian, came to Texas from New York after one of his cases went downhill. When Mike makes fun of the Pope's photo in the believing Brian's office, that's just one example of the rather clumsy way in which the opposites are played out here.




The job makes you lonely, marriages fail - these are also motifs from the standard repertoire of police films. But the main characters' numerous frustrations remain more or less assertion here and are not explained. Rather, it has to be enough that both Mike and Brian as well as Pam brutally beat suspects if it gets too much for them again. The villains, on the other hand, can be read from their noses - the figure drawing is so superficial that it is detrimental to the tension. The actors can hardly do anything to counter the problem. Sam Worthington ("Avatar - Departure for Pandora", "Terminator: The Redemption") cultivates a grimly closed face and his favorite sentence is: "We are not responsible for that", while Jeffrey Dean Morgen, who was, of course, committed to self-abandonment Jessica Chastain ("The Tree of Life") can only hint at her class in a small role, so that of "Kick-Ass" star Chloe Moretz remains with a mixture of forced precociousness and still very girlish defiance Stray Anne embodied the only really interesting character.




Compared to the bumpy dramaturgy, the underdeveloped characters and uninspired staged dialogue scenes, there are also pluses. The gloomy pictures of a truly inhospitable area by cinematographer Stuart Dryburgh ("The Piano") create an unmistakable atmosphere in many moments Intensity of a downpour indulges.


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Conclusion: Ami Canaan Mann's only second film is a stencil-like crime thriller with some atmospheric strengths and an unusual setting that even the mostly pale actors cannot raise above mediocrity.


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