Good lord is this an awful movie. The characters and say nothing that any human being would do or say. It's amazing that a lady who is head of a major gun manufacturing company is someone no one misses when she is held in the park. She is trapped chained to a hot dog stand....where of course she never has to pee...and which has conveniently placed Coke products for product placement...and the only people she speaks to are the sniper and the next the next important character needed to move the plot forward. No one calls her about missing a facial appointment or anything like that.Of course there is a bomb in the cart. Yet...with hundreds of people walking by all the time not one damn one of them ever notices that she is chained to a hot dog cart! And...with a sniper trained on her...which means there is only one single angle to shoot from but no one can figure that out...and a cop shot dead in the street for at least 12 minutes before any rescue can arrive....so nice of the dreck to inform us...NO ONE IS TAKING CHARGE OF THE AREA TO SECURE THE AREA! Not only was any legal context of the Second Amendment ever researched before writing this crap...law enforcement 101 was also skipped.This is an amazing exercise in convenience. Nobody's cell phone dies at the wrong time and the calls are not interrupted. The master villain knows everything about everyone and knows exactly when they will show up. Everything is so "pat" it is just silly.

This movie is like a theater play. There's only one location and no action. This can make good movies. Tape (www.imdb.com/title/tt0275719/) for example is an excellent movie in my opinion. Baring entirely on dialog and acting. Liberty stands still lacks these qualities and is neither entertaining nor involving. It is however very annoying from start to finish because the premise is totally unrealistic and lacks any intelligence. I don't like movies where a bad guy (or eventually not just bad Wesley the sniper) has godlike control over his victims. Judging by the presence of a lot of comments with pro firearms opinions some people tend to think this movie tries to make a political statement against firearms. That is just foolish. Of course godlike control handed by a gun is THE ultimate way to market guns. Therefor rather than being an -though original- but failed attempt at an action movie without action, or a thriller without thrills this is a far far far to long commercial for guns, I say. Mabey there is some cleverness in this crap movie for passing as the opposite.It gets two stars because just one star is reserved for ultimate crap.

Kari Skogland does an excellent job keeping this taut thriller shot in Vancouver together. If you know who Linda Fiorentino is, then that's enough reason right there to watch and she doesn't disappoint - in fact she carries most of the movie. And you may be a Wesley Snipes fan, but odds are you've not seen him do something like this before. There's also a bit role for Oliver Platt and a tonne of extras or 'almost extras', and the way Skogland sets her shots is attention-getting.Now you're going to run into the pro-Columbine people who say 'but you should have presented both sides of the issue'. To these spineless mugwumping weasels I say the following: in perhaps no country save South Africa is there as much violence as in the US. The likelihood of getting shot and killed in the US is more than four times as great as in Europe.Those are not opinions either, so there's no point complaining people have to present both sides of the issue. Those are facts.This movie is scary; it is raw; and it's made (and written) by someone with conviction. See it and be convinced.

Some people are saying that Kari Skogland could be the next Kathryn Bigelow. And LIBERTY STANDS STILL just might be the turning point that could make it all happen. This was Kari's first movie with a bigger budget and a few well-known names in the cast. But since this movie dates from 2002 and Kari since then never did make anymore movies with a big cast, I begin fearing that her rise to fame simply will not happen. Still, I wish her a lot of good luck, 'cause with LIBERTY STANDS STILL she made a damn good movie.It's about a man, who calls himself Joe, and appears to have excellent shooting skills and a lot of connections. He takes hostage Liberty, the wife of a corrupt arms-dealer. He does that by cleverly having her cuffed to a hot-dog stand in a park which contains a bomb. Meantime Joe himself has a sniper-rifle pointed at her from a nearby building and keeps in contact with her through a cellphone. Now that's what I call an original hostage situation. I won't tell anything about Joe's motivations or demands, 'cause I don't want to spoil the plot. But I can say that the movie pulled me right in from the start and kept my interest 'til the end. And that was a pretty difficult thing to do, since the movie's story almost entirely takes place in real time on one location and the protagonist (Linda Fiorentino) can't do anything throughout the whole movie except standing still, being cuffed to a hot-dog stand. But a lot of things do happen, and I must say that Linda Fiorentino was perfectly cast and very believable as a women that would keep her head cool under such extreme circumstances. Then there's Wesley Snipes as Joe, the sniper. And, man, he was good. He never leaves the room he's in but delivers his lines with great finesse. And the conversations he had with Liberty over the phone were almost debates with good arguments from both sides. Now I was expecting the predictable with Joe starting to loose it at one point or another, making him do irrational things and making mistakes (something that usually happens to the bad guy in these type of movies). But Joe never broke a sweat and kept thinking clear until the end. Also Oliver Platt was decent as ever, as Liberty's husband, the man you would rather not want to have as a husband.Director/writer Kari Skogland clearly doesn't like guns and with this movie criticizes the American Second Amendement (the right for all people to buy and own guns, I believe). And her message comes across very clearly with a lot of good points. I didn't think it became tedious at any point and it didn't feel like the viewer was being force-fed with liberal ideas concerning the subject. So all those non-liberals should stop complaining about the movie's message. Freedom of speech, remember? But I can clearly see why any right-winged gun-nut hates this movie. But I do think that this movie might just be a little bit too politically correct when it comes to who dies and who stays alive in the end. But that's just a minor complaint.LIBERTY STANDS STILL simply is a decent, tense and thought-provoking thriller that, for once, doesn't rely on spectacular action-scenes or big explosions. Just a rather original hostage-story, a good setting, a decent cast, good filming and editing and an enjoyable electro-soundtrack by Michael Convertino (which reminded me of early music by The Chemical Brothers).