The greatest movie ever!

One of my all time favorites.

It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

To fully understand how realistic this movie is one would have to understand the radical change of home assaults in Spain during recent years.Ex-combatants from Eastern Europe and beyond have recently found themselves out of job and out of borders in the EU, so many of them have recycled themselves into well-trained, ruthless, and well organized criminals, the type that Europe is not truly prepared for.If someone enters into someone's home in the US, chances are the intruder may be received with a legally owned gun and the right to shoot and kill that person. Unfortunately for Europeans, gun ownership is generally not that easily allowed, and confronting a criminal may cost the victim in court if you happen to hurt the "poor" criminal.To make matters even worst, Europeans are used to quiet thefts, the ones that steal your stuff when you are not home. You may cry for your stolen TV, but not for your personal safety.So when military-trained criminals, used to brutality and violence, come to one's house, there is little one can do......or isn't there?Here is where we find this excellent movie, if by excellent we mean "plausible". Do not expect dramatic performances nor John Wayne coming in his horse via the living room. However, expect human emotions and human actions.I do not give 10 points because I have notice a certain inconsistency in the criminal side of the plot that makes the movie less believable without any reason other than trying to stick to what almost every single movie on this genre does. Worse still, it does not affect the outcome of the movie, so I do not understand why it was necessary to attempt to modify the realistic formula that works so well in the rest of the movie.However, if you are willing to forgive that slip, you will be rewarded with an incredibly realistic portrait of the drama that many Spanish families suffered and are still suffering today.One tip: If you are going to watch this movie, get your reading glasses and opt for the original Spanish version with English subtitles (which, by the way, is something that you should do whenever you watch any movie at all).

Three hooded Eastern-European criminals burst into a home in a Madrid gated community, holding the family hostage in its own home, and forcing the father to empty his credit cards.The opening scene is creepy and disturbing, with visuals somehow reminiscent of "Timecrimes". While the two films are worlds apart, this just sets the tone for how disturbing everything will be. And "disturbing" is the operative word, as home invasion is the most disturbing horror subgenre because of its realism.A successful home invasion film feels real, feels like something that could really happen to any of us at any time. It is not a killer in the woods or an alien, but real criminals that can beat, kill or rape us on a whim. Such situations are rare (thankfully), but all too possible. This is, by the way, a successful one, right up there with the best (such as "Funny Games").The biggest complaint is that there is some poor dubbing at times, especially on the daughter. But if the film is watched in Spanish with subtitles, such a nuisance can be avoided.

"Take your last breath!" (this film's tagline) is right! Secuestrados is a film guaranteed to leave with you the suffocating taste of the bitter ash of defeat.Things start out normal in Madrid as a family, (Jaime, Marta, and their daughter Isa), begin the moving process into a new, perfect home. There are telemarketers calling, problems with the gas company, "this goes here, that goes there" dialogue. All this, plus some mother-daughter arguing is served atop the mundane white noise of the shuffling moving crew, charged with the task of bringing the old into the new.Much in the style of the movers, Miguel Angel Vivas manages to update a classic scenario of home invasion without pandering. From the first startling moment of disruption to the last gnarled turn of fate, we see a stark realness and urgency that offers up not only what is baser and visceral for the characters, but also a glimpse at how they think, and ultimately, how they are disappointed.

If you've ever had nightmares about a home invasion - here's where they get played out. A family moves into a new home. If you've ever moved you'll know there's something kind of creepy about the movers right away. They're too interested in exploring the house; they follow the family members around too often. They're suspicious. And they should be. That night, the family ends up being terrorized by a gang of violent thugs. What starts as a terrifying but still relatively simple robbery eventually descends into bloodshed, rape and murder as the father is forced to accompany one of the invaders into town to withdraw money from his bank account, while his wife and daughter are left at the house at the mercy of the others.There's really no character development at all in this. The movie opens with an extremely disorienting scene of an obviously hooded, bound and kidnapped man escaping across a highway desperately looking for help, except that you figure out pretty quickly if you pay attention that this can't be the same man. The first impression given is that you're going to have a flashback movie explaining how the man came to be in this situation, but the only other explanation has to be that this guy and his family are are victims of the same gang. It's mildly disorienting at first, but it's also very obvious that whatever we're seeing at the movie's start isn't directly related to the home invasion that's portrayed. The story moves pretty quickly to the family who are the real focus of the movie. We learn little about them. They seem to be a typical father, mother and daughter. There's no particular reason for them to be targeted - which is probably the most frightening part of the movie. This sort of thing won't happen to very many people (thankfully) but when it does happen, it could literally happen to anyone.The movie progresses (if that's the right word) from being frightening, to being violent, to being very bloody and graphic and in the end quite horrifying. It's well done. It's a Spanish movie. I watched the version dubbed into English - and even the dubbing was done fairly well. There's not really much to complain about, although I'm not sure that the scene at the beginning was really necessary. It disorients for a few minutes at most, but then it serves no real purpose. (8/10)