A Saint in the making (A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints (DVD))

Member Name: sympatic

Product:	A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints (DVD)
Date:	31/10/09 (24 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good use of New York as a back drop

Disadvantages: loses momentum

This was aninteresting tale which is based on the life of the films director Dito Montiel. The film depicts life on the street of New York in the eighties and the role of Dito is played by two actors, Shia LeBeouf plays the young Dito while Robert Downey Jnr plays the older version. Most of the film focuses on his early years as a teenager so I guess you could say that Shia is in the lead role.

The young Dito aspires to be a muscician however his hot headed friend Antonio played by Channing Tatum has a habit of dragging Dito into trouble even if this is not his intention. Another ecentral character in the story is Mike an outsider to the tight knit group of friends around Dito but someone he has something in common with as they share similar dreams about improving themselves.

his is an interesting bit of film making with the superb setting of New York providing the landscapes and dirty grimey feel of a run down part of the city rife with crime and violence.

Honour and revenge are big factors in peoples lives and these two factors are often the cause of the problems the young people face. The acting is slid in this film, both Tatum and LeBoeuf are good in their roles.

The film does lack focus at times and tends to run out of steam in the middle sections of the film, once you get used to some of the strange characters that inhabit the area they cease to have such a good effect and as such the film goes a little flat.

Unfortunatley this means that the end of the film is rather disjointed and does not work very well so what started out as an interesting film loses momentum after a while and even though I persisted with it to the end my other half gave up and stopped paying attention two thirds of the way into it.

It is a gritty film and quite hard hitting in places but it fails to really hold the viewers attention for the whole film and that is a shame because it showed promise early on.

Summary: Good start but weak finish