Both Alexis Smolensk (whose taste in films I trust completely) and Rob, one of my work customers, recommended this to me.
Have I seen this before? I'm getting deja vu... Oh yeah. As soon as we learn that mobster Yulian's little brother is the guy who got attacked on the bus, I recognized that I'd seen this once before, a long time ago.
Didn't take notes while watching, save this: when Hutch brings his wife and kids out of the basement, it's meaningful that they cover the young daughter's eyes, but the son, who's sixteen or so, gets to see the bodies and the blood.
This movie has cool skeletons in it, but its plot is unfortunately also a skeleton. There's little substance and no meaning to what's going on. The characters don't have names. The fishermen and the shadow fish are never explained. Having a character misquote the section of the Bible concerning Noah's Ark and the Flood does not magically lend your movie any meaning whatsoever, even if your movie's setting seems to be a world that has been flooded. (Also, take a drink for "Japanese media that attempts to use Christian themes without understanding them.") All in all, though this movie is pretty, it's not inventive and not worth your time.
I struggled with whether to give this a score of 2.5. I would recommend it but only barely, and I don't think I'd watch it again. I appreciated it as a whole and liked it in parts. It does make good use of its runtime to make you feel the baseball game stretching on and on, from morning into night.
It's fine. It even made me laugh a few times. But it could have been truly wacky and not just rehashed Nic Cage (as much as I like some of his movies.)
