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Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

Don't listen to the negative reviews

Admirable film.

Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

Maybe they should have called Agent Scully instead and ... Well I should stop right there. First off, I don't even know which one was Scully and second of all, this is one of the traps our leading lady might fall into. Even me, and I haven't seen any X-Files episode, know her from that show. And while she was really good and funny in a romantic comedy 10 years ago, I do think that the X-Files are hanging over her head (for most people that is).But that is not, what is most wrong about this movie. It is very bleak and very dark (and I'm not only talking cinematography, which is fine, but also mood-wise). I wouldn't have a problem with that and even the female lead gets away with it (and then some), but Danny Dyer is the weak link here.He seems like a fun bloke (as you would say), but he can't handle the role. Plus it's not superbly written to begin with. Still and because I do love strange things, I kinda bared with it all ... I can't promise you will be able too though (or if you are gonna even love it... ?)

Dan Reed, an award winning documentary director, débuts with a thriller that will only be watched for its self proclaimed shock value and soon forgotten for the lack of this and, quite frankly, any value whatsoever.Alice's (Gillian Anderson) and Adam's (Danny Dyer) meeting is one of a chance. After he installs an alarm system in her upper class apartment, she invites him to a dull house warming party in a countryside in the unlike role of a sex toy. Their accident is one of a chance too. Alice hits a deer and they are both forced to pull over to remove the suffering animal from the road. There, they are attacked by three men they passed by earlier on. Adam is brutally beat up and Alice's raped. After one month recovery, she manages to return to work and Adam, with one eye blind and his face scarred stays locked at her home, struggling to overcome his accident inflicted impotence. When Alice learns of her father's death she drives to the countryside again where she encounters one of the rapists. She persuades Adam to take revenge they supposedly deserve.Reed, with a brief 76 minutes running time, skips any unnecessary expositions but unfortunately in the process, looses most of the motivation for both the characters and the audience. What's left is paper thin. Dyer is his own, low class, laddish caricature and Anderson's middle aged, sexy businesswoman is played on a hysterical autopilot. Even their unlikely affair is played out with no true interest in an inevitable contrast they create. It seems that they both serve a foolish, deus ex machina plot where Reed's main moral concern is whether the revenge is not even more dehumanizing than animalistic behaviour that provokes it. He's bend on making a statement but with no interest in the process, he jumps right to the end far to quickly and makes the whole experience unconvincing and uninteresting.Straightheads, for the most part, plays out like a character film but the little emotional intimacy that the characters actually share, is blown away by the outbursts of violence and sex. They do little more but emphasize the growing brutalization of Adam and Alice-something so painfully obvious and insubstantial that it's difficult to find any justification for the grim tones that film hits. In its attempt on deep, structured emotional insight into the life post trauma, it seems to be too brief and relies too strongly on in-your-face violence to awake any serious afterthought.And even despite its length, Straightheads is a drag. With 20 minutes of deleted footage available on the DVD, it looks like it wasn't really sure of its narration's rhythm. It ultimately emphasizes little of the tension and drama that first rate thriller should provide and instead it dwells on cheap, worn out psychology. The metamorphosis of Adam and Alice is foreseeable and because of that disengaging. As the film, unbearably slowly, drifts towards its conclusion, Dyer's restrained pansy regresses into a violent psycho and the film reaches its feeble ending with no constructive point. It all ends too abruptly with ambiguity that is usually reserved for films of explicit intellectual strength. But Adam's stare on the audience remains empty- a worthless gesture, a last failed stunt committed by a film of a stunning, obscure numbness.Verdict: Straightheads seems like a challenging attempt but comes across as to scared of any serious commitment to its brutal, provocative subject. Instead it will try to shock you with relentless, gruesome images but it's all just a sombre bore. It recalls visceral, nauseating power of Straw Dogs and Irreversible but is nowhere near as engaging, original or graphic.1.5/5

After finishing watching this terrible, terrible piece of "film" I decided to log into IMDb and just let it all out. But then I took some time to read some of the reviews here and most of them pretty much summed up everything I felt about the movie.I'm a X-files fan, so I watched this only because featured Gillian Anderson, despite knowing that this was a bad movie.But come on! I mean, Did Gillian Anderson read the screenplay before signing to play this poor, unidimensional character? It is just terrible, painful, sad. You just don't care about her character or any other character as well. The story comes from nothing and goes to nowhere. Before 10 minutes into the picture you're already bored and asking yourself how a movie can be so bad.What the director/writer had in mind, what was the message? It's a cold movie, just a terrible experience. So, to sum up this garbage, there's no development at all, just plain and stupid nudity, violence and a terrible story.

An unpleasant woman and an equally unpleasant man are violently and horribly assaulted by a group of two-dimensional psycho thugs during a night-time encounter on a forest road in Shropshire, England. The man and woman who were assaulted plan and carry out a revenge attack on their attackers...Utterly repellent piece of voyeuristic trash, somehow masquerading as 'thought-provoking' drama, whilst actually coming across as sub-Michael Winner cr*p (you just know that Oliver Reed and Susan George would have been cast had it so easily have been made in the 1970s). What happens to Alice (Gillian Anderson) and Adam (Danny Dyer) is appalling and devastating, yet Dan Reed somehow manages to rub the viewer's nose in every last glob of its sexual nastiness. His camera lingers hungrily on Anderson's naked body both during and after the assault, whilst the script leaves almost all the characters floundering in a turgid sea of two dimensional cliché. His script forces his characters to behave in such a way as to alienate the viewer further from the 'victims' by shoving more ghastly situations into their faces (Adams's attempted post-incident assaults on both Sophie and Alice; Alice's assault on Heffer AFTER his suicide-attempt confession).The quandary comes from the central protagonists' performances - Dyer is a horrible actor, incapable of light and shade as the young male victim of the initial assault (he'll end up in Eastenders, mark my words), but Anderson is extraordinary. Even as the atrocious script forces her character to behave in depraved and ludicrous ways, she somehow delivers an extraordinarily compelling and complicated characterisation as a self-indulgent, arrogant hedonist who encounters such horrors and needs to retaliate.A vile and pointless film then, almost but not quite rescued by a compelling central female performance.