I was hoping for so much more from this. Blair and George are two of my favourite actors, and Skarsgard is always watchable. Sadly the stupid script and lack of direction lets this down.Blair is a tiny, tiny lady and yet here we have her overpowering and manhandling numerous giant (to her) thugs and criminals apparently all on her own. I can't suspend belief to that extent. Also she seems to be some sort of electrical and mechanical whizz.Seeing as we are told very little about Blair's character, I can't say if she has some secret past as a weightlifting nerd. Nor is there adequate explanation about the history between her and the cop. As for George, well she just looks totally out of place, and again we know nothing about her.A few shocking, brutal scenes aside, there is very little substance to this and it fails miserably as a story or piece of entertainment.

Melissa George seems to pick out very good scripts (Triangle (2009), is another favourite of mine). This is one of those films that gets better and more engaging as it goes along - the twist was a bit of a surprise but I thought it was done well (it could have gone either way). There was a bit of gore but not much; the focus of the film was on the mystery.Some of it felt a bit gimmicky (i.e. the equation on the front cover) and I felt that could have been discussed/handled a bit differently to make it more realistic but it doesn't really matter.There's a thing these days where low budget films use overly shaky cameras to hide the low production value ("it's meant to look like that") and to be honest, it gets annoying in places. The shots of people standing or sitting still did not need a shaky camera! I didn't know Selma Blair was in this and actually, there were quite a few famous faces I wasn't expecting to see. I watched it because of Melissa George and her ability to pick good scripts. Selma's performance was good and she clearly put the effort in to play it straight but I never quite believe her. There's always something about her that says "haha, just kidding".None of this detracted from the film though and it does make you think (a bit) and was very entertaining.Well worth watching 8/10

I enjoyed seeing the film Waz. A series of deaths have started occurring in New York; Some are being found mutilated while others have an equation wÎ"z = Cov (w,z) = ßwzVz carved onto their skin. As police investigate they discover each victim was forced to choose between sacrificing their own life or a loved ones' life. Before long it becomes clear that this person has suffered just such a similar fate can Captain Maclean and his officers such as Eddie Argo and his new partner Helen Westcott try to stop this suspect, because he or she won't not until he or she gets to the end of this equation. I thought that this film had a great feel to it, and the story was interesting. I would recommend this film.

I missed the first twenty minutes or so but I gather that what happens is that another semi-psychotic serial killer is loose in New York City. He -- or in this case, she -- seems to have been made to choose between her own life or that of a loved one by some criminal. Now she's out for revenge on everybody with an unsavory past.I came in at the point at which the killer, Selma Blair, has some tattooed rapist shackled to a chair in one of those empty lofts. Equally bound, but festooned with electrodes, his loving grandmother sits a few feet in front of him. The idea is that Blair will torture the rapist until he can stand no more pain and can only make it stop by fingering the switch that will electrocute his trembling Granny.The detective on the case, Stellan Skarsgaard, must have done something terrible too, because before he knows it, he's tied up in the torture chair and his adoring young pal, a black kid from the streets, is in the hot seat.I like Stellan Skarsgaard's work a lot. He's a fine actor, in the minimalist tradition of Gary Cooper and Robert Redford, although his range is greater than theirs. (He goes ape in "Goya's Ghosts.") He can do villains or avuncular figures. The set point for his facial muscles might be described best as "resigned." But this movie -- what I saw of it -- really is an egregious piece of garbage. Skarsgaard isn't bad, and neither is his black street pal. The other players, such as the police chief, are barely competent.Selma Blair's performance is critical and doesn't match the creepy role. She's sullen and slow and a little whiny as she explains patiently why she's not enjoying the torture she's dishing out. I kept waiting for something like, "This hurts me more than it does you." She's beautiful, of course, but her voice is filled with glottal stops and sounds like that of a nice, well-bred young woman from Michigan.But she doesn't torpedo the movie. The script and direction do that.The script gives an enormous amount of screen time to the torture scenes and, man, are they graphic. Blair slumps around in her enervated way and only seems to come to life when she whangs an iron nail under the fingernails of a victim, or shatters their tibias with a heavy metal mallet. The strapped-down victim of her attentions is screaming and covered with blood while the person on the receiving end of the electrodes sweats, shivers, and begs the victim not to give him the juice. At least one other reviewer has described the torture as not prolonged or gratuitous. I guess it's not "prolonged" because the director cuts away at the moment hammer hits nail, but that leaves us with five minutes of foreplay to enjoy, or four minutes of fiveplay.The excremental script aside, the story presents us with one of those grimy urban settings, all ghoulish green, with posters peeling off the sweaty walls and graffiti covering every exposed surface -- as if things weren't sufficiently depressing. The camera alternates between close ups of ugly, perspiring faces, often with drool hanging from their lips, and wobbling instantaneous shots of irrelevant objects or actions. I believe this cliché must have begun with MTV years ago, both having appeared at about the same time. I can understand it on MTV. Here's Elton John playing the piano. What is a director to do -- give us five minutes of just watching Elton John play the piano and sing? No. There must be inserts of his fluttering fingertips, chokers of his open mouth, fireworks on display. But, my God, I wish they'd dump that tendency. We're not all fourteen years old. We can concentrate on a static scene for more than a few seconds.But not even defter camera work would help this movie. What's the target audience? Who enjoys seeing people tortured in extended scenes? It was chilling when Michael Madsen described what he was going to do to the captive police officer in "Reservoir Dogs," but all he did was cut off an ear. It was an agonizing scene but the audience did not have to watch the ear actually being removed, and it didn't last long, and the point was not only to shock the audience but to paint Madsen as the evil sadist he was.This movie invites all of us to become sadists. Yes, enjoy the foreplay. We know the orgasmic pain is coming so we can afford to linger over the repeated thrusts of the narrative. Relief is just around the corner.It stinks. And I despair because we seem to be turning into an entire culture of S&M freaks. Are we really headed towards enshrining torture as the national pastime? How low can we go? Give me lurid sex any day. This meretricious excreta and all those responsible for it belong in the dumps or, better yet, some radioactive waste disposal site.When Blair finally slices open the throat of the blubbering Skarsgaard, the sound track echoes with the slink sound of metal against metal. Ugh.