a review of 终极手段

It's about as perfect of a version of this type of movie that there could be. I've been between 4.5 and 5 for the past couple of days, and what really pushes me to 5 is how truly great John Heard is here; he simply sinks right into his role and delivers an incredible performance. (It's enough to make up for my biggest strike against the movie: How one character's thread simply vanishes near the end.) (Second biggest strike against it? Jack Nitzsche's singing voice.) A light-neo-noir, paranoid-sorta-mystery, not-quite-a-conspiracy-thriller wrapped in a shroud of a sort of post-war societal and systematic fatigue where optimism has faded. The story moves along briskly, but it's all kinda just a table setting for these characters to exist and actors to shine (not just John Heard, Jeff Bridges and Lisa Eichhorn are also terrific). Anyway, I loved it.