Such a frustrating disappointment

Sadly Over-hyped

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

It is ironical that Sean Penn portrayed a violent psychopath so brilliantly in THE ASSASSINATION OF RICHARD NIXON only the year before (2004, see my review), and that his ex-wife Robert Wright Penn has here portrayed a female equivalent character equally brilliantly. Surely they should have stayed married if they can both psychose so well. Why not do it together rather than in separate films? Oh well, more people would probably get blown up that way. This film has an unfortunate title which is bound to have put everyone off and diminished the audience. After all, how is the public supposed to know that 'Sorry, Haters' is the title of a TV series about rich celebrities made by the company Robin Penn's character works for? OK, so it relates ultimately to this film as well, but that is really carrying subtlety too far, and was certainly counterproductive. This film was written and directed by Jeff Stanzler. Unlike many script writers, he can direct his own work very well indeed. And as for the script and the plot, they are so fantastically ingenious that this ranks as one of the most unexpected thrillers I have ever seen. It is a truly innovative film noir. It is very rare for any one to be clever enough to get such new angles and come up with a story this original in such a well-ploughed genre. There is nothing listed for Stanzler professionally in the five years since he did this. Is he getting his strength back after this harrowing and utterly brilliant shocker? The film twists our preconceptions about current events concerning terrorist atrocities into unrecognisable and novel shapes. The setup of a stooge in this film is just as ingenious as the one portrayed in ARLINGTON ROAD. Robin Penn begins the film as a highly strung and neurotic independent TV producer who takes a taxi. The driver is a devout Muslim who wears a little white hat but speaks fluent English and French. He is a refugee from Syria, and as he takes Penn on an extremely long drive costing about $200, he and she become acquainted. He stops off to see his sister-in-law (played by French actress Elodie Bouchez, see my review of her in PACT OF SILENCE, i.e. LE PACTE DU SILENCE, 2003) and baby niece. He is trying to get his brother released from confinement as a terrorist suspect and Penn offers to get a lawyer to draft an official letter for him about this to the authorities. But countless bizarre events happen, one after another, in bewildering succession, and it turns out that Penn is not a TV producer after all, but merely a lower-level employee of the company, and the office she had appeared to use was that of her old friend Phyllis, brilliantly played by Sandra Oh (who is of Korean extraction). Phyllis's husband and child turn out to be the ones which Penn had told the taxi driver were her own ex-husband and her own child, and this is revealed to be untrue. But that's only the beginning of the surprises. Things get stranger and stranger. It turns out that Penn, who is treated by Phyllis as her best friend, is really a sociopath and psychotic who secretly hates her and wants to harm her (she scratches the paint off her car covertly, for instance). But her moment of truth is when she revels in the fact that the only time Phyllis ever called her and 'was weak' and needed comforting was on the day of 9/11. She says: 'That was the only time I felt I was not just a nobody. I want that day back.' However, I do not want to ruin the surprises by telling any more. Suffice it to say that if you want to stage a terror attack in New York, and you are clever enough to blame it on an innocent Muslim whom you pick up in a taxi, well you might appear in this film. Abdel Kechiche, a Tunisian actor, does a superb job of playing the difficult and complex role of Ashade, the taxi driver. He fully matches the intensity of Robin Penn's performance with his own.

This independent movie of an completely (to me at least) unknown director was surprisingly good, reminding me the sophisticated plots and turns in the way we perceive the characters of the early movies of David Mamet. I recommend that you watch it as a a psychological drama, and not as some general commentary about terrorism. The movie starts like an immigrant to American relations drama, with a_ little_too_good_to_be_true Muslim cab driver Abdel Kechiche taking for a night ride alcoholic and frustrated TV producer Robin Wright Penn. We soon find ourselves in the typical immigrant drama, with an actual component, as the brother of the cab driver is a prisoner in Guantanamo, soon to be shipped to Syria where he would be tortured or worse. An soon after we start finding out that all this is a set up for a very different type of drama, a psychological one, where the culprit lies somewhere else, and the impact of terrorism in the day to day life comes from an unexpected place.There are some details in the movie that make the story non-credible, and some of the political touches are too exaggerated. And yet, the quality of Robin Wright Penn's acting, and the delicate balance of the relation in film changing from empathy to stupor and hate and emotion towards the final and brutal twist leaves a very special feeling. Not all corners may be perfect in the story of the film, but there is a level of truth and anxiety about our lives that makes it step ahead of the crowd.

This self-indulgent vanity project is a superb example of why writers should not direct their own movies. The film showed real promise at the beginning and the acting is fine. However, the tempo and plot are uneven and often under-developed. Most importantly, the movie suffers from a split personality about half way in and the director/writer can't quite decide what film he's making. The movie is one part moving emotional drama. The drama centers around a troubled woman just trying to get by and make sense of post 9/11 New York city. However, the movie is also part pointless thriller/horror. This thriller/horror element of the film is poorly crafted and simply does not mesh with the rest of the film. Instead, it left me with a bad taste in my mouth. The thing that depressed me most about this movie is that I felt that there was a genuinely amazing film buried somewhere underneath the train wreck of this film.

He's a chemist from an ethnicity and a religion that we've come to associate intimately with terrorism, working as a cabbie in New York City, trying to appeal his brother's freedom from Guantanamo. She's a businesswoman making a large transaction from an ATM machine who flags him down, has him drive her "uptown" which turns out to be Englewood Cliffs. The moment she steps into his unit, she's become a part of his life. Of course, for the near 100 percent part of drivers, passengers are just sitting there, being driven to their destinations, occasionally talking about the little things.But Phoebe isn't your ordinary woman.She's a bomb waiting to explode. She's self hatred taken to extreme lengths, feeding itself on destruction and a particular day in American history -- September 11, 2001 -- looking for a special person whom to focus her poison onto. Now she's found her patsy as a Syrian man named Ashade, and is enacting what she feels is revenge on another woman (Sandra Oh) whom she blames for her misfortunes. Once in Englewood Cliffs, she proceeds to vandalize her ex-husband's vehicle by leaving scratch marks on its surface, and it only gets worse. She now proceeds to ruin this man's life.It's hard to talk about this kind of movie because of the way it develops at a little past the halfway mark and drops hints of what is to come in ways that are clear, but not on an initial view. Phoebe insinuates herself as a successful businesswoman into Ashade's life and promises help to him, his brother and his sister-in-law (Elodie Bouchez) who is an illegal alien and whom Ashade has an unspoken attachment to. Her almost masculine forthrightness at the beginning of the movie (and up to about halfway through) is only the surface of a much deeper psychosis at work. In effect, it's what makes the dynamic relationship between she and Ashade work and develop later on into the horror that ensues. Because Phoebe, that bomb awaiting the moment of detonation, wants to -- in her own words -- cause some damage.Ashade, on the contrary, does not want to do damage and is horrified at her plan. He's just a guy trying to do the right thing, but the story has his ethnicity and the time-line of the events of this story a part of what he gets subjected to. Where Phoebe is a damaged person -- a motif that echoes throughout the movie as she cuts other people's property, her own body, and through a box containing something sinister and gets sealed in her last words to Ashade, "I want to give you something my parents gave me" -- Ashade is trusting, open, and thus vulnerable to this elaborate set up that will divide viewers and make them either "hate" this movie or accept it as a challenging event that is as far left from Hollywood as anything made today about Middle Easterns and the post 9-11 situation.Is this a political film? Not completely, even though 9-11 is never mentioned. What about the faces of billionaires Phoebe is pasting onto a collage that also depicts the terror of that day? I believe it's her own view of successful people, people like Oprah or Martha Stewart or Donald Trump or Bill Gates who seem to have it all, and all that she can attest to is a modest apartment and a dog. Watch for the mystifying conclusion to this collage, and draw your own conclusions.If only for the performances, SORRY HATERS is an excellent feature. Robin Wright Penn is one of the scariest sociopaths this way from Alex Forrest in FATAL ATTRACTION, and her switch from masculine to subservient at a crucial plot point (down to the clothes she wears later on) is chilling, as is her reactions in a dinner scene. Abdellatif Kechiche as Ashade is the victim, a man driven to desperation and extreme measures due to the casual yet sadistic manner that this woman has destroyed all that he has in life. They, along with Sandra Oh, make this movie worth watching if with a huge caveat.