Save your money for something good and enjoyable

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

I was looking for something different and came across this 2013 movie on Amazon streaming. It stars Taissa Farmiga, the younger sister of Vera Farmiga, as Anna Greene, bright but mysterious wealthy teenager who decided to quit eating. Taissa really was a teenager when this was filmed and she is quite good in the role.My summary says it is set in an alternate universe, because from what we now know the techniques likely will never be available in our own real universe. An investigator, played by Mark Strong, is among a group who can use a technique while holding hands with a subject, in this story it is young Anna. This transports the investigator back in time and is an invisible observer of what happened sometimes years earlier, he sees and hears the subject and those with her.All this is to help young Anna overcome whatever difficulties she has and to lead a more normal life, otherwise her mom and stepdad are planning to institutionalize her.The difficulty is, the visits to her past are only as faithful as are her own memories, if she manipulates her memories the investigator might be seeing something that didn't really happen that way. And, as the story unfolds, it seems that maybe Anna is too smart for the investigator.Well made thriller it kept me engaged all the way through.

The movie will hold your attention, but seems to lose it's direction after about a half hour or so in. I also wonder why they paint the man's lips to bright red. Totally distracting. Looks like a cartoon clown sometimes in the movie. Other times he looks normal. I don't get it why they do that.

First of all the positives. There are so many truly dreadful video projects being called films coming through these days that is always a relief, personally, to get past the first few minutes and realise it is well made movie. And this one really is. It deserves a 5 just for that. The premise here though is becoming over used, that film quality memories can be generated by putting a few sensors on someone's forehead and that others can participate in those memories. Silly really as a plot device, but the cast and script mostly gets past that. Brian Cox' American accent is for me still quite funny, but everything goes well until it dawns you're being set up for a 'twist'. As it unveils you have to try too hard to ignore all the plot devices and they just become silly in the end which left me feeling disappointed. Why can't script writers think up and execute genuinely unforeseeable or just credible endings to these types of films instead of leaving you thinking of the dozen or so gaping holes in the plot or what sane people wouldn't have done. Shame, all great up to the end.

The preposterous is something many filmmakers today take for granted. I keep smelling an air of carelessness in the plots of many of TV programs and films that reveal a disdain storytellers have for their audience. Maybe they think that since moviegoers spend a billion on seeing The Avengers, Harry Potter & Pirates of the Caribbean, they must be willing to buy anything. I sincerely thought that style of filmmaking went into the production of Anna...John Washington is a "Memory Detective". He does some type of Star Trek mind meld with crime victims, in order to... well, that's one of the fuzzy things that the storytellers never really firm up. Does he go into the minds of these victims to recover lost memories like license plate numbers, or phone numbers? Of course that theory is blown out of the water with the first scene when he goes deep into the plight of a survivor of an assault, so that he can...well, again, they never really address why. But it's a salacious assault. And it looks good cinematically.While John is peeping in on that assault, his "memories intrude". He remembers that his wife died…not of an assault, but hey. His intrusive memories cause him to have a stroke, and he's out of the game for months. He is "lucky" to get his next assignment: making a sixteen year old girl end her hunger strike.Why they would call in a "Memory Detective" and not a counselor is up for debate. Are hunger strikes now a crime? But enter John Washington who mind melds with Anna, a troubled girl who has troubled girl issues – Sex, Drugs, Money and Art – that play well cinematically. John memory reads her, and finds after a good thirty minutes of story that a crime might have occurred. Perhaps the "Memory Detective" Agency's motto is if you look hard enough, everyone has committed a crime.Actually, if they had gone into depth on a story such as everyone commits crime, this would have been a better film. Or maybe if they would have expanded on the sub-plot that memories aren't very reliable, a good sci-fi story could have come into play. Or maybe if they would have gotten rid of that last twenty minutes, this wouldn't have been such an awful film. But neither the director, Jorge Dorado, nor the writers, Guy Holmes and Martha Holmes thought to do this.It's a mystery where this film takes place, both in time and location. They have very American looking shots of skyscrapers and bridges. (They filmed in Spain.) A scandal brews over an affair of a Senator – but we don't know if he's a U.S. Senator. The writers never give us any concept of how the "Memory Detective" came to be accepted by the courts. But we find out from a hokey newscast that "Memory Detectives" are treated as star investigators, even though in the same newscast it is pointed out that these star detectives "aren't as reliable as DNA".No. Really?