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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
An eerie ghost story? Or just plain old psycho-crazed murder?, August 19, 2010
Everyone else thinks Pat Fisher was a suicide. Detective Inspector Tom Monroe (Robert Carlyle) isn't so sure. A paranoid, stumbling man, Fisher finally eased his pain one night by running onto a highway into the path of a truck.
In Fisher's room, Tom finds a class photo of a group of 10-year-olds taken in 1976. Fisher had circled three of the children's faces. They were part of a small group of the kids who played together. Then there was the tape recording Tom discovers with Fisher's frightened voice rambling on..."Amy was the first. It happened on a Sunday. She was picking bluebells. The place where they found her was always a favorite. We built our tree house near there then, our sanctuary." With Amy the first in 1976, those whose faces were circled have all died, some when they were adults. Another odd thing; the photo shows 33 children, but there were only 32 in the class of '76. One of the children in the photo is smaller than the others. His face is blurred. Tom, a gloomy sort of lonely man, starts investigating.
Monroe: Class of '76 is a British two-part television mystery that leaves port with great promise and then slowly sinks. At times it seems to take forever to get to the conclusion, which turns out to be a flat, disappointing letdown. The writers created an eerie, intriguing and puzzling story...and then evidently realized they needed to find a way out of the set-up they'd created. They took a hurried, easy and unlikely route. It doesn't help that they had to fill about 150 minutes of screen story time. There's a lot of talk. There's a lot of watching Tom staring off into the distance while he reflects on his own sad issues. There's a major red herring that adds nothing to the plot but eats up time.
Why bother with this? First, Robert Carlyle. This Scot is an outstanding actor. He's not handsome. He's small and on the scrawny side. He's so good and so versatile that he brings interest to just about any movie he's in. He does here. Second, the movie's gloom and eeriness comes through. Monroe: Class of '76 is well photographed and edited. Third, the set-up: People murdered after a class picture was taken of them as school kids...a mysterious additional child in that picture no one seems able to identify...and the murders are continuing. For me, these three elements were hard to resist.
I stayed with the movie to the end. The conclusion, plus the sluggishness, turns the movie to two stars from four. Still, I like Carlyle. I'll make it three stars.
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5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Welcome to the Class of 76..., March 14, 2007
A man is killed by a truck on a free way and at first everyone is saying that the dead man, Pat FISHER was clearly suffering some sort of mental breakdown.
Even the local police think that it nothing more than a terrible tragedy but Detective Tom Monroe (Robert Carlyle, The Full Monty) is not so sure that Pat's death is so cut and dried, especially when he finds newspaper clippings, some old school photos including a group photo taken in 1976 where one of the children's face is blurred and no one can remember who he/she is, not even one of the teachers who taught at the school.
Monroe soon discovers that there are other mysterious deaths among the children in the school photo he he finds in Pat's belongings and that his old friend's strange words on a tape recording that "they have all been murdered" might just have an element of truth in it and with this in mind Monroe sets about finding out the horrific truth about the Class of 76.
This is a really suspenseful film which makes you physically jump on more than one occasion, in fact I found it really creepy at times, and though the ending is not quite what you expect, you do understand what has happened even if you don't quite believe it.
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2.0 out of 5 stars
Atmosphere galore & fine acting... but oh so slow., May 21, 2011
This is the type of movie that the Brits do better than anyone -- carefully paced, beautifully filmed, ethereal, and just a little bit haunting (or maybe, haunted). Usually I really enjoy this type of flick; I'm patient & easily seduced by atmosphere and pretty scenes. And the shots of Stirling, Scotland really are pretty (this area was home to William Wallace, aka Braveheart, in the 13th century).
But MONROE is long... I mean really long. And slow, really slow. So by the time the end slowly crept up on me, I was oh so sleepy. For me, there's just a little too much careful pacing and atmosphere. Once in awhile, something (anything!) needs to happen... besides another elegantly-framed, bloodless death (there are a bunch of those).
I watched to the end, but I was pretty bored by then. Maybe that's just me... or maybe you, if you're not up for a long (two-part) BBC mystery that unfolds... slowly.
You decide for yourself.
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