The Red Siren (2004)

Best movie of this year hands down!

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

I heard about this film and thought 'meh, sounds like a corny action b-film', expecting something along the lines of XXX. But was taken by delightful surprise after seeing it one night on the Movie Network. Olivier Megaton does a very good job filming this movie, with points for action sequences and style. There are no corny one line phrases you see in typical 0ver-rated action films, and it provides a good selection of characters. The action scenes are beautifully filmed, preferably the gun battle in the hotel and the when the film climaxes at Alice's father's place near the end. The rotating camera around Alice as she kills her mother was a pretty damn cool idea. Acting itself was decent, nothing spectacular but nothing to complain about. Good mix of characters and satisfactory storyline. 7.5-8/10

Okay, having just watched The Red Siren, I have to ask why. Why has this excellent euro-thriller been ignored so much that the only way I heard about it was by drifting about looking for Asia Argento movies on Play.com, post Land of the Dead. In the end I wound up watching this and xXx in my quest, and while I've got a lot of love for Messers Diesel and Cohn and their crazy 2 hour explosion-fest, The Red Siren shoots xXx out of the water like a crazed redneck with a sawn off.The plot is best described as a familiar tale unconventionally told, involving a freedom fighter and a detective (played thoughtfully and powerfully by Argento) who find themselves unavoidably entwined in an attempt to save Alice, a young girl on the run from her maniacal gangster mother. This is not unheard of as a plot line in thrillers, but it's told in a wonderfully organic and odd fashion, making the movie feel fresh and new.The acting is great, even if at times the dialogue becomes strained as a result of the cultural diversity of the cast (there's almost every major European nationality in here at some point, leading to some lines being a little garbled or sounding out of place). In fact, the acting is on par with anything Hollywood has to offer. Speaking of Hollywood, lovers of big budget action will not be disappointed with Red Siren, as it redefines the words 'slick manic action'. While not an orgy of destruction like the aforementioned xXx, Red Siren has both great car chases and some of the best set piece battles I've seen for a good long while. The hotel shoot-out is so fantastic you'll need to remind yourself to breathe.All in all, Red Siren is essential viewing for any action nut. It has fantastic acting, a great story and frenetic action sequences. Couple this with an arresting visual style and consummate direction and we're onto a winner.

Euro thriller is flawed but mostly entertaining. Casting is a typical Euro-pudding mish-mash of international actors and varying accents, with some actors obviously and not particularly well-dubbed. Asia Argento at least does her own dialogue, but some of the voice actors here are stiff enough to be distracting, particularly the girl, who never really generates much sympathy since her line readings have all the emotion of a bored child in language class. The central relationship between the good-hearted mercenary and the girl on the run from men with guns is highly reminiscent of Leon, but without any of the chemistry. Like most European films shot in English the script suffers from frequent, occasionally laughable tin ear for the language. On the plus side the movie is quite stylish and the suspense set pieces are well-constructed and mostly quite effective. On the whole I would recommend this one, but with a more competent English language rewrite and a cast that actually could speak the language, this might have been a far better film.

I went to see this film because I had read the novel by Dantec. The litterature is not a masterpiece but constitutes the basis for a wonderful film. Unfortunately, Mr Megaton(the director), seems to have misunderstood the strength of the novel. This story is a psychological one based on the relationship of a daughter with her murderer mother and the one of a little girl with an idealistic Bosnia Mercenary. The Director Olivier Megaton does a very poor job at expressing these complexities beeing to buisy showing long shooting and actions scenes, giant explosions etc... Except from Jean Marc Barr who is somehow convincing as Hugo, the actors interpret the complex characters whith very talent and little complexity. The mother murderer seems like a movie version of Cruela Devil from the 101 dalmatians. The plot beeing somehow far fetched, this film's characters needed to be given realism to make the experience fulfilling. Yes the shooting scenes are filmed with talent and the sound quality is astounding but pure technique and craftmanship are not enough to make a movie. The film lacks layers and depths. Few people in Europe needed to be convinced that a European director could make an action movie. The problem is that this movie is the synthesis between the worse in European and American films It is filled with useless actions scenes, flat acting and unfinished characters(like in usual action hollywood films) and it has the badly explored psychological, philosophical and social themes of an unsuccesful european film