Buy The Hole
2001
Rated: R for graphic language, drug use, graphic violence, and sexual content.
Genre: Suspense Thriller Drama
Directed By: Nick Hamm
Running Time: 1:43
Review by: Felix Vasquez Jr.
Review Date: 12/08/05
DVD Features:
Deleted Scenes
Commentary - 1. Nick Hamm - Director
Trailer - 1. Theatrical Trailer
Text/Photo Galleries:
Image Gallery
Cast & Crew Bios
If you like this, try: Rashomon, Tangled, Cabin Fever, The In-Crowd, Open Water, Dead Birds, Basic, Wild Things

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General Sideshow / Weta
THE HOLE

 

Right from the very eerie opening shots of the movie, I was taken in, and in some ways, "The Hole" strived in nihilism, or whatever shreds of it I was able to find. "The Hole" is in actuality a lot like "Rashomon", a mystery with many points of view that have yet to be discovered until the climax. "The Hole" in the end is a pretty sick and twisted story with enough plot twists to be deemed watchable and sometimes entertaining. Not to mention Thora Birch is an immensely talented actress who becomes a plus here. Keira Knightley also has an entertaining bit part as a supporting player who is also a skank becoming the sometimes antagonist to Birch's character.

I was disappointed, yes sir, I was disappointed, and let me make dis a point, I expected more from this movie, a lot more, a lot more than I eventually got. In many ways this movie was too derivative in both tone, story, and basic character structures. In the end this was too similar to many other films I've seen in the years past; take the movie "Tangled" (Please, I beg you), that was a movie very similar to this one in both story and basic surprise twist ending, and ultimately "The Hole" was a very skewed concept, to say the least. Why anyone would let their friend lock them up in an abandoned, undiscovered bunker is beyond me, and with no safety net in the outside world, that's yet another leap of logic I'll never understand.

They could have had their party anywhere in the world, but they basically decide on an underground bunker where no one can find them? That's a ridiculous move made by the movie's cast that further keeps from sympathizing or caring about what happens to either of them. The story is just basically yet another of the million re-treads in which a horrible event is told differently in the eyes of its separate witnesses. One story is painted as a simple story of revenge, a mere morbid prank, the other is a tale of popular people battling one another's massive egos while trying to stay alive; the paranoia and hysteria rapidly deteriorating their sanity while they try to find a way out, or a way to cope, and I was just looking for a way to speed through the movie. I mean would a bunker really go unnoticed in the woods?

I mean if you look at the length between the bunker's location and the woods, it's basically at the entrance, it's not really all that deep within the woods, and this becomes what might have been a really good experiment in paranoia and survival ends up by the second half, just becoming another variation on the whole "Fatal Attraction" concept that I just didn't care for a bit. What's worse is the movie's marketing has been based mostly around Keira Knightley and her newfound popularity when really this is Thora Birch's film, and even she isn't worth that recognition as her character's British accent fades in and out and basically does nothing and adds nothing to the story, and for the record, I didn't buy the climax one bit. She's too hot to be depicted that way. Otherwise the film teeters on and on with a plot that just drones on showing the flashbacks in the hole and different depictions of it, and whether or not one occurrence was real or fabricated, and with the way the movie starts out, I expected something really gory to happen and I was let down. The entire movie was just a let down.

Despite interesting performances from Thora Birch, and Keira Knightley and some entertaining story aspects, "The Hole" ends up in a creative ditch with derivative elements, and a climax that was just ridiculous.

  • Unlike most film productions, the scenes for this movie were shot in order.

 

 

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