Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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1.0 out of 5 stars
too many implausibilities..., October 26, 2009
The behavior of the people in this movie is just not believable.
I typically love these kind of movies, where the main character is set up to experience a life-or-death situation that causes true growth (like Sara Connor in the first Terminator movie). But it ends up being a lot of aimless running around in the woods made to set up situations where Basinger can kill her pursuers with items found in the toolbox from her car.
There are moments where she does even not try to get away -- instead she continues to hang around near her pursuers and listen to their conversations. There are other places where she's so clumsy and noisy it's ridiculous. And the scene where she actually starts seducing one of the boys is laughable. Basinger has always been one of my least favorites actresses, but even Meryl Streep couldn't have made this work...
Not until the final scene does she show signs of turning into someone different than the lame, superficial, brow-beaten housewife she started out as, and as satisfying as that is, it wasn't worth watching the whole movie to get there.
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2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
A total waste of time, August 31, 2009
Someone I respect greatly recommended this film. No more film recommendations from this person. The credits go on entirely too long, in part because there are 20 or so executive producers, Kim Basinger and Benicio Del Toro included. Del Toro's a weak enough actor, but this movie proves he has even less talent for the production end.
Basinger plays a beaten-down housewife to an abusive husband (Sheffer), who ticks off a local gang (of four--a popular bunch) in a mall parking lot. After they murder the security guard who attempts to help her, they chase her in order to rape and murder her. Thus begins a formulaic and unrealistic chase and "beaten down woman realizes her power" story. Other than the methods she uses to kill the punks, everything is predictable, including the ending.
Even with all that, there are some idiotic things that still nagged at me:
1) Basinger's character uses items from her car's toolbox to kill the punks. Despite taking more and more things from it, it never rattles and gives away her position. Her gasping, freezing in place, shrieking, and urinating do more to give her away.
2) The movie's set on Christmas Eve, but during most of the forest sequences, nobody's breath steams.
3) This movie contains a double cliche: the too-intelligent multiracial gang. The gang is PC to the nth degree with one Caucasian, one African-American (-Canadian?), one Hispanic, and one Vietnamese. Gangs form out of common factors, race being the most obvious--can we please have a realistic bunch of punks on film? They also don't use words like "incendiary" or look wistful when talking about "seeing the ocean just once."
If you want to see a good crime story with Lukas Haas, either get "Witness" or "Brick."
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0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
THE GOLD STANDARD FOR THIS GENRE IS "ALIEN"--WATCH IT INSTEAD, October 22, 2009
WHILE SHE WAS OUT is a horror film with pretensions to serious "meaning." It is based on a horror short story of the same name by Edward Bryant, a respected writer of science fiction and mysteries. Here is a short excerpt from his story, taken from an online marketing blurb:
The lights, bright and blinding, blasted against her mirrors.
Della stamped the accelerator to the floor.
This was crazy! This didn't happen to people--not to real people.
The mall security man's blood in the snow had been real enough.
In the rearview, there was a sudden flash just above the left-side headlight, then another.
It was a muzzle-blast, Della realized. They were shooting at her.
Let us agree that we're not dealing with fiction that competes with Steinbeck's or Faulkner's or Hemingway's best stuff. This is junk-food fiction, and in some moods this is exactly the sort of thing many of us enjoy relaxing with. But we don't kid ourselves.
In the film, Kim Basinger plays Della, a mother who needs to buy more wrapping paper for her twins' presents on Christmas Eve, Craig Sheffer plays her husband, who suddenly becomes abusive towards her when his business is going bad, and Lukas Haas plays the leader of small gang of punks who decide they will rape and murder her because she dissed their ability to park their car properly at a mall.
The DVD's hardcase gives a semi-accurate summary that might be construed as a spoiler: "Kim Basinger ... stars as Della, an ordinary suburban housewife who witnesses a cold blooded killing while finishing some last minute shopping. Keeping her wits about her she tries to flee while pursued by a young psychopath ... and his three henchmen. She crashes into an unfinished housing development near the woods. ... Armed only with a toolbox and the will to survive, Della must figure out a way to kill them one by one or she will never see her family again."
Given this "plot," we expect (and get) another movie about a good looking female overcoming great odds when put danger. In other words, it is of the same general genre as ALIEN and ALIENS and TERMINATOR and even CHARLIE'S ANGELS. And yet it lacks the drive and imagination of any of these. In making the transfer from the page to the screen, Susan Montford, the director/scriptwriter, makes it clear that she has no idea how to build and maintain suspense, how to create characters who either have consistent traits or have inconsistent traits that are plausible, or how to provide us with a diverse array of defensive/offensive techniques which build to a climax. Even the easily foreseen killing of the fourth punk is more of a "fizzle" than a "blast"--and the film keeps going for quite a time after that. Most people, I believe, will find the final scene of this movie is a huge disappointing cop-out.
One of the "bonus features" on the DVD is a commentary track where Susan Montford discusses what she was trying to accomplish in her first full-length film. Among other things, it becomes crystal clear that she is totally misinformed about the so-called Stockholm Syndrome (which has to do with hostages becoming emotionally attached to their captors over a prolonged period of time--unlike any situations in this film). And if Montford had meant us to see the ending as a Feminist Statement of any sort, she should have made Della's husband more clearly a villain--and should have made that ending more clearly a decisive act.
If you STILL want to watch it, I would say rent it rather than buy it. And why did I rate it two stars instead of one? My mental math went like this: HALF A STAR FOR KIM BASINGER + ONE AND A HALF STARS FOR LUKAS HAAS = 2 STARS.
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