{"id":19039,"date":"2016-02-03T21:26:22","date_gmt":"2016-02-04T02:26:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/?p=19039"},"modified":"2016-02-03T21:26:22","modified_gmt":"2016-02-04T02:26:22","slug":"the-tall-man-2012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/2016\/02\/03\/the-tall-man-2012\/","title":{"rendered":"The Tall Man (2012)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"the-tall-man\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Pascal Laugier\u2019s \u201cThe Tall Man\u201d is one dry heave of a drama that paints itself as a horror movie. Worse more it pretends to be a take on \u201cThe Slender Man\u201d when really it\u2019s just one heaping helping of melodrama about kidnapped kids and altruistic nurses taking their love for them one step too far. It\u2019s a shame, too, since the opening montage isn\u2019t only creepy, but seems to be setting us up for one hell of an eerie and haunting horror film built on a scary premise. I wanted to invest time in the film once the initial hook runs its course. It\u2019s just sad that the film itself never lives up to any of its promise.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

When \u201cThe Tall Man\u201d isn\u2019t leading us down a road of \u201cplot twists\u201d that feel more like we\u2019re being jerked around, it conveys this utterly despicable commentary about the lower class and their inability to raise children. \u201cThe Tall Man\u201d is set in a small mining town named Cold Rock where the local community\u2019s children have slowly begun disappearing. Based around spotting them being lured in to the woods by a shadowy figure they eventually begin to identify as \u201cThe Tall Man,\u201d the efforts to keep their children close and away from the enigmatic villain becomes ever more terrifying for the town folks. After returning to town with her son David, nurse Julia awakens to find out he\u2019s been kidnapped.<\/p>\n

Chasing down the shadowy figure in the woods, she begins a cat and mouse game of survival with the kidnapper, all of which leads us down a path of shocking revelations. \u201cThe Tall Man\u201d doesn\u2019t take us where we expect, completely flipping the coin on the narrative mid-way to give us completely new perceptions of which characters are our victims and which our predators. \u201cThe Tall Man\u201d doesn\u2019t really rise in quality once the big revelation rears its head prompting a different quest for young David\u2019s innocence. Laugier tries to draw out the premise while also setting up a ton of red herrings that will mean nothing in the second half of the movie.<\/p>\n

This makes \u201cThe Tall Man\u201d feel less like we\u2019re investing in a mystery, and more like we\u2019re being deceived mainly because the writer had little narrative to run on to fill ninety minutes total. The consistent twists and revelations eventually become tiresome, and you just want them to get to the point and explain how such a massive scheme could ensue without anyone slipping up. Biel\u2019s performance is adequate for what is a glorified Lifetime movie of the week, and can never rise above the gimmicky trappings of the film and its premise, sadly. \u201cThe Tall Man\u201d had true potential, but it\u2019s just a colossal waste of time built around tricking us with illogical plot twists, and a convoluted hard to follow narrative.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pascal Laugier\u2019s \u201cThe Tall Man\u201d is one dry heave of a drama that paints itself as a horror movie. Worse more it pretends to be a take on \u201cThe Slender Man\u201d when really it\u2019s just one heaping helping of melodrama about kidnapped kids and altruistic nurses taking their love for them one step too far. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[240,302,703,1008,1020],"class_list":["post-19039","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","tag-crime","tag-drama","tag-mystery","tag-supernatural","tag-t"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19039","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19039"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19039\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19041,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19039\/revisions\/19041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19039"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19039"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19039"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}