Monday, August 10, 2015

Review: The Gift

by Adam Riske
This one kicks all kinds of ass. See it as soon as possible.

I loved The Gift and that took me by surprise. The trailers looked generic and I just recently lamented the quality control of The Gift’s production company – Blumhouse – when I reviewed their recent movie The Gallows. To my complete and utter shock, The Gift is one of the best pure thrillers I’ve seen in recent years. The writing, the direction and the performances are all excellent. Everything feels grounded in The Gift and that goes a long way to maintaining the suspense of the experience. Whereas I was expecting another Fatal Attraction or Unlawful Entry based on the marketing – i.e. entertaining thrillers but also very heightened, stretching believability – The Gift is suspenseful, sneaky, surprising and more unsettling. This is the type of story that would work just as well as a play. Its smallness is an asset.

Luckily, The Gift also really works as a cinematic experience because writer-director-costar Joel Edgerton is in total control of his material, playing the audience effortlessly. He’s The Gift’s MVP. The script is rich with themes like the power of ideas, the importance of our choices and our responsibility for our actions. The movie is all the more thrilling because it’s intellectually stimulating at the same time. The characters he’s written (specifically Jason Bateman’s Simon and Joel Edgerton’s Gordo) are terrific – complex and sympathetic and despicable all at once. The script displays a filmmaker who is very respectful of an audience’s intelligence. It’s an unsettling script that also somehow doesn’t sacrifice being fun at the same time.
The direction and performance by Edgerton need to be lauded too. He directs in a moody and commercially inviting style (he’s made a handsome and slick-looking thriller) and I hope The Gift is a sleeper hit so that Edgerton gets more opportunities to write and direct. He has the makings (so far) of a great filmmaker and storyteller. His performance as Gordo is solid work, too. Edgerton is an actor I look forward to seeing in movies now (he livened up Warrior and The Great Gatsby, for example) as he always brings a lot of confidence and interesting choices to his work. In The Gift, I’ll remember his dead shark eyes and that weird helicopter sound he made. Both give me the chills.

I loved how the movie also played with the screen persona of Jason Bateman– specifically his everyman-ness. Coming off of strong dramatic work in Disconnect, Bateman takes it to a whole other level in The Gift and gives what I think is his best performance buoyed by a great character arc. Bateman is usually the best thing in bad movies and it’s such a joy to see him kick ass in a good one. The movie also stars Rebecca Hall as Bateman’s wife, and this is the one area of the movie I didn’t love. Through no fault of the performer, she often seemed like a pawn in a slugfest between two men and that was a little disappointing for me. It’s as if Edgerton didn’t have a grasp on how to write her as a more active participant in the proceedings. But that’s just a nitpick, because Hall gives the character all she can.
I alluded earlier that a major reason the movie works is because it’s intellectually creepy. I want to dive into that some more. The Gift is really a movie about morality and I’d go so far as to say it might actually have a positive influence on society because I think it might make people second guess how they behave with one another, making you reconsider the people in your life you may not have treated the most fairly. The Gift is a movie with something worthwhile on its mind and that’s really great in what seemed at the outset to be just the next disposable commercial entertainment from Blumhouse.

The Gift is one of my favorite movies of the year so far. I had a great time watching it. It reminded me of 2005’s Cache -- always a good thing, because that movie is just about perfect. I’m trying to avoid going into much detail in my review because I want to preserve The Gift as an experience for you. The less you know about it going into the movie, the better. I think this is a movie that will work on multiple viewings too (once the mysteries are revealed) based on the strength of the filmmaking and the performances. I get a real charge out of seeing something this good (especially when it comes along as a surprise) and I think most of you will like it as much as I did. Don’t let this one go unseen or underappreciated.

32 comments:

  1. Saw it. Loved it. I also recommend it highly. It worked on me a little more creepily, though, because I used to know someone a lot like "Gordo." Well, the person I know didn't get as serious as Gordo does later in the film, thank God, but it was still eerie those comparable traits up there on screen.

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  2. Glad you liked this one Adam. In a summer full of movies that I was hoping would be happy surprises considering their bad reputations (terminator genysis, pixels, fantastic 4,) but still ended up being terrible, I never expected The Gift to be the one that filled that happy surprise slot. I'm glad good movies for adults can still be made.

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    1. TravisL, "happy surprise slot" sounds like a crude and badly translated Japanese product. Maybe that was the true gift after all.

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    2. Happy surprise slot: get one for your loved one this holiday season

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    3. Not cool guys: the Remco Pocket Pussy is a sponsor of the site - don't shill for the competition.

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  3. Thank you for the Ruby in the sand, something to look forward to, You got lucky this time which is nice, For some reason I expected you to get lumbered with Fantastic four and have to try to write about it while holding your head in your hands. Cheers Adam

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    1. I find it much harder to write about a good movie than a bad one oddly enough.

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    2. Yeah I can see that, if you like it you really want to do it justice, I'm looking forward to seeing it

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  4. Fantastic four was like dinner when your a kid. The gift was my desert.

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  5. Yay a good review for a new movie! Feels like it's been a bad summer for that! Also been a bad summer for me watching movies but I'll put this one on my short list - glad to see the absence of Katie Holmes' breast don't hurt this one too badly!

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  6. I'm glad you liked it, I really enjoyed it as well. If there is a problem with it, it would have to be the contrived climax/ title of the film. If you think about it, the film really pushes the limits of believability. It one of those films that is great while you are watching it and begins to unravel the more you think about it.... now that im writing this, i think that may be true for most thrillers. Oh, and I actually thought that Rebecca Hall was really good. She nails the frightened/confused look that the film demands of her multiple times.

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  7. I think the terrible marketing for this did its job. Despite a million glowing reviews, I have zero interest in this. I must've seen that awful generic trailer 100000000 times this summer. Every time It would show up, a little part of me died. Then that little part of me was replaced with movies that don't have Jason Bateman, or look like they were made in the mid-nineties. I'll rent it in a couple of months tho.

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    1. Same here, the trailer made me lose interest right away. But Riske's review has pushed me almost to the point of wanting to see it. Should I resist or give in? Ugh, can't... breath!!! :-P

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  8. The trailer for The Gift makes it look so generic. It's a movie that's gonna depend on critics and word of mouth buzz. I wasn't very interested in The Gift till I saw Chris Stuckmens review on YouTube.

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  9. I had no interest in seeing this until I saw how well it was being received, critically. I agree that the trailers did it no justice. After thinking about it, I don't know how else they could've done it without giving too many plot points away. I've always liked Jason Bateman but was kind of sick of him playing the same guy. This was such a different performance. Great review! I would stick this into my happy surprise slot over and over and over...

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  10. The ending just doesn't hold up to logic for me. It was a "that's it? That's your master plan?" reaction for me.

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  11. So happy to see something like The Gift doing well at the box office. I went to see it Friday at an AMC near me, and much to my surprise, it was sold out. I had to drive an extra 15 minutes to see it. Really good movie though, anchored by a great non-traditional script and 2 cornerstone performances. I thought Bateman (what a dork) did an especially great, nuanced job.

    We should have expected this out of Edgerton though. He wrote the screenplay for a 2008 Australian crime called "The Square" which I think is absolutely great and recommend it to anyone who can see it.

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  12. Really happy to see good reviews for this one. I was looking forward to seeing it because I really liked Joel Edgerton's last script (well I think it was his last script), Felony from 2013. Which again seemed like a generic cop movie, but it was a really tense well done movie, well except for Tom Wilkinson's Australian accent. Just simple to the point. So yah!

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    1. I caught felony on Netflix. It is pretty good.

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  13. I had no interest in seeing this.. Hadn't even heard much about it. I read your review yesterday and saw the film last night. I'm glad I did. Thanks Adam!

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  14. So I did something I've never done before, I went on Wikipedia and read the plot summary for the Gift. Why not? I'm not planning on paying to see it, and I was curious as to why everyone's sucking its dick. But yeah, now I'm double not-interested.

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  15. So I did something I've never done before, I went on Wikipedia and read the plot summary for the Gift. Why not? I'm not planning on paying to see it, and I was curious as to why everyone's sucking its dick. But yeah, now I'm double not-interested. I get the impression that this is really gross and ugly.

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    1. Sounds right up your alley!

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    2. What's wrong with sucking a movie's dick if it's a dick that you enjoyed?

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    3. Right! Or like, sometimes it's a movie's birthday and it's been awhile, so...

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    4. If you think I sucked this movie's dick just wait till my review later this week. I took on some balls too.

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    5. I'm liking the new positive spin on what the "F" in F This Movie stands for - who says we need to re-brand?.

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    6. The F stands for Finger in the butthole. That's the trifecta!

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  16. You don't like my chicken?

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    1. Your chicken's fine, it's the cock I could do without.

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  17. You were totally on the money with your review, this one kicked all kinds of ass. I wasn't sure what Jason Bateman's role was going to be in this one, but let's just say he surprised the hell out of me. I was not expecting him to be so versatile. I don't want to spoil, so I'll just endorse the recommendation. Bravo Joel Edgerton!!

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