The film started off in thrust and Perry as the characters used words as swords. Curses flew like bullets and every punchline was a sting, a hit, a dive, a dodge, you name it. The script is at its best and untamable when the room is crowded with four five more characters who fight to get a word in. And it all makes sense when a hundred voices interweave to say the same thing: we”re going to die.
Imagine His Girl Friday with not just Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell throwing words at each other, but a whole lew of people. Indead, Machiavelli Hangman maximizes the humor and the wit of His Girl Friday, the masterpiece of 1940. It”s a throw back to those comedies that made us think and at the same time laugh.
Machiavelli Hangman is the story of George Newman, a loser who can”t seem to get a handle on life and does everything wrong. Interestingly though, and this is the redeeming element about his character is that he somewhat manages to know right from wrong and he often chooses the more righteous path. Without wanting to give too much away, George is caught in a case of mistaken identity and he is forced to do things that number one he couldn”t because he”s such a dork and number two, he wouldn”t want to because he”s such a moralist.
What makes this movie into such an exhilarating ride is how the story is told. It”s nothing like you”ve ever seen before. Memento took the movie and presented it backwards so that we would know the result before the cause. In this case, we find out what the result is, then the cause, then the alternative cause and then the real cause. Rashomon did it in a similar way by having the characters flashback to different interpretations of the same story. In this case, there is only one version of the story but we as an audience chose to see one thing instead of another because of our preprogrammed understanding of Hollywood conventions.
Shervin Youssefian (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1352346/) who is the writer and director of the film creates a situation where everything seems to be pointing at one possible result and we only follow the guidelines to figure out for ourselves what is not shown. Later on, as the scene is played again, the surprising and somewhat embarrassing factor comes into play when the audience realizes that it”s been fooled the whole time. The film is like the Sixth Sense, but what that film did only at the end, Machiavelli Hangman (http://www.hangmanmovie.com) does throughout the whole film.
The acting is superb and the directing is first rate. Machiavelli Hangman is a film that will be cherished and enjoyed for a long time to come and will only get better with every viewing.
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