Better Late Then Never

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Ok... Let's be honest. It cannot be the best movie but is quite enjoyable. The movie has the potential to develop a great plot for future movies

I watched this movie specifically because I have prosopagnosia, although in a milder form than the main character; I can recognize my face in a mirror.The way face blindness is portrayed is very clever, in that every time she loses sight of someone, a new actor takes over the role. That is, to some extent, how I experience faces (but I am less likely to get confused immediately; it's more when I see people the next day they look different).If you were to remove the portentous music and Milla's disturbed reaction shots, it would have taken me a while to figure out anything was out of the ordinary. I would have eventually, because some of the changes are pretty extreme (at one point her boyfriend suddenly develops then loses heavy five o'clock shadow during sex), but a lot of times I would not have realized they'd changed actors if the movie hadn't telegraphed it. I assume if you're good with faces that you would see what was happening even without Milla's reaction shots. Unfortunately, that's pretty much the only thing the movie gets right. It's very slow moving. Sometimes it feels like things have been left out or poorly explained. There is also a therapist who comes across as so creepy that no one would go back to her; what's up with that? And in the first session, her comment as Milla leaves seems to come out of nothing in the conversation up until then. The movie is full of such momentsUltimately this is an alternate take on the blind-girl-in-peril concept. If you want to see a good one of those, you'd be much better off watching that great old Audrey Hepburn movie Wait Until Dark. I only made it through about half of this before jumping to the end for the last ten minutes.

Milla Jovovich is a charismatic and talented actress who sadly, it seems, is in movies that undermine her potential to really stand out on screen. Faces In A Crowd is a junky, cheaply made horror/thriller that could have been saved if it had stayed consistent with its brilliant opening. The sleek, cold, futuristic vibe of the city Milla's character resides in has so much potential. The production design was killer (no pun intended). The camera-work - before it became sloppy as the film went on - was top notch. It was reminiscent in style of paranoid 70s thrillers (i.e. Coma, Fantastic Voyage, The Stepford Wives, All The President's Men) in terms of some tense situation happening in a creepily inorganic environment. Such an environment ratchets up the tension because the viewer cannot be comforted scenically by anything in the film around them. The film however, as it progressed, got sloppier and sloppier. The scenes involving Face Blindness are chillingly effective for the first 15 minutes, but soon get old. The film simply doesn't hold together. It is also a blatant rip-off in all departments of a 1990s thriller called Blink with Madeleine Stowe. The similarities are as bizarre as Dredd and The Raid: Redemption's similarities, although stylistically this film is more competently made. All in all, a real disappointment. It's got a clichéd ending, a poor middle, and a brilliant opening that falls flat on its face. My big question, what happened? It started out so well...

The brilliance of this movie is they keep you confused about the identity of each character by using dozens different actors for each character, morphing, makeup etc. Just like the heroine, you can't remember what each character really looks like. The changes start out subtle, so it feels like your memory is faulty. You experience the world partially through the eyes of the heroine who cannot distinguish faces. Voices, builds etc. are not distinctive either.This ambiguity of identity greatly enhances the problem of the heroine knowing whom she can trust. It is a traditional horror movie where the heroine refuses to take sensible precautions, and keeps putting herself at mortal risk. This movie works because the heroine is so vulnerable and because the villain takes such sadistic pleasure in teasing her with her strange vulnerability. It kept me on the edge of my seat. I normally find the genre boring.

Usually, I look for Horror films to watch (and later review), simply because I'm a huge Horror fan. However, many great Horror films have many Thriller features in them especially the rush and guessing work the audience goes through, then finally the twist towards the end.Faces in the crowd is an excellent Detective Thriller / Whodunit, using a very original and genius idea. A serial killer is terrorizing the state, and the sole eye witness who has seen him in the act - suffers head trauma and loses the ability to differentiate or remember faces. The careful and very clever cinematography portrayed the condition of "face blindness" in a very relatable way, making the audience almost go through the same experience as the protagonist.The script was very good in my opinion, some of the lines were truly magnificent(especially those of the deaf Psychiatrist, trying to explain to the face-blind protagonist how to remember faces the same way a deaf person remembers music). The twist towards the end, however, could have been better, and the ending felt rather anticlimactic. That was very unfortunate, as this film had the potential to be one of the best.All in all, I had a great time watching Faces in the Crowd, one of the best story ideas I've ever seen! Trying to remain objective I rate it 7, but don't miss out on it!