Franklyn (Franklyn (DVD))

Member Name: shaneo632

Product:	Franklyn (DVD)
Date:	30/06/09 (4 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Curious and compelling

Disadvantages: Slow pace and not enough going on

On a budget of £6m, it's a massive achievement that Franklyn looks this good, especially with a cast consisting of stars such as Ryan Phillipe and Eva Green. With a masked protagonist (played by Phillipe) that resembles Rorschach from Watchmen, it's not much of a surprise that the film has become mired in obscurity, with most people simply presuming that the advertising is talking about Watchmen. Nevertheless, it's definitely an intriguing film, and well directed by Gerald McMorrow, whose work on this film is his debut work on a feature film.

It's an incredibly engimatic film for a large portion of its runtime - fleeting between two parallel realities of contemporary London and the futuristic metropolis of Meanwhile City. A masked vigilante Jonathan Preest (Ryan Phillippe) crawls the streets for most of the film, looking for the big bad called The Individual, whilst, parallel to this, Emilia (Eva Green) is a troubled young art student that's enduring an existential crisis. These two worlds are brought crashing together, but it's a painstaking journey for sure, and information is drip fed to the viewer with pretty slow pace for a film that runs in at a lean 95 minutes.

Too often do directors instantly associated mystique with intellect, because this is a deceptively simple film under the guise of complexity. It offers a powerful plot twist in its final scenes, that's surprising considering the film's seemingly liberal slant, but it's mostly too late for a film that meanders along too leisurely.

An uneven but visually impressive low-budget film, Franklyn boasts a solid plot twist in the film's third act, but it isn't enough to distinguish the film from the numerous films of similar kind. Curious enough, and nice to look at, but a little muddled and rather derivative.

Summary: Short and sweet but slow paced also