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movie review - Birthday Girl

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

This is a movie about a quiet Englishman who - after years in a mind-numbing job at a bank, and years of loneliness - decides to send away for a mail-order bride from Russia. What he gets instead, is a scam. He soon finds himself stripped and tied up to a toilet in a hotel bathroom, having just robbed his own bank.

The strange thing is, that's when the movie gets uninteresting. It's actually the build-up that carries the first 75 minutes or so of this movie quite ably. It's only after he's freed himself and found the 'bride' tied up in the room next to him that the plot begins to falter. Which is surprising, because the scenes that eventually build-up to the betrayal are all very good (Vincent Cassel applies his usual intensity to great effect, here).

While the ending actually pulls this one out of the fire, somewhat, it's the muddled twenty minutes that get us from that bathroom to the final scene in an airport that hurt the film.

Not recommended.