SpecialsTarget Disturbing yet enthralling

Peereddi I was totally surprised at how great this film.You could feel your paranoia rise as the film went on and as you gradually learned the details of the real situation.

Ketrivie It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

Joanna Mccarty Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

bowmanblue A Life Less Ordinary was the next film in the highly-bankable combination of (director) Danny Boyle and (actor) Ewan McGregor. After the success of Shallow Grave and Trainspotting, it was thought that they could do no wrong. Sadly, A Life Less Ordinary was not half so well received.Critics accused it of simply missing the point and lacking direction. And, yes, I can see their point. However, that's not to say that it's all bad. It's about two angels, charged with the task of getting the most unlikely couple (spoilt rich girl Cameron Diaz and penniless writer and toilet cleaner, Ewan McGregor) to fall in love. What follows is a road movie involving kidnapping, quirky angels and robbery.Perhaps the problem is that it was marketed as a romantic comedy. Yes, it has both elements (mainly romance), but not much comedy. What replaces the traditional laughs is more a surreal atmosphere more akin to a Monty Python film in places.Personally, I liked it. Or rather most of it. There's not many people who seems to like all of it. I will admit that there were certain sub-plots that could have been left out.It's not that funny, but its uniqueness does give it some kudos. Plus Diaz and McGregor make a cute couple, so, if you're a fan of either of them, this should tick enough boxes for you.

capt_cleere I really loved this movie, it was well written, well directed, and well acted, and the icing on the cake is Cameron Diaz, she is quite the package, smoking hot with a great personality and is just awesome in this movie. Ewan McGregor is no slouch either, his high energy keeps the film moving at a nice steady pace. What really ties it together is a perfect sound track. The entire film is planted with mood enhancing songs that roll flawless with each scene. What I loved is how the director kept the film light, no overly heavy scenes, keeping it fun throughout the entire picture. Holly Hunter and Delroy Lindo's characters were hilarious and I found myself constantly rooting for them. I would put this film in my top 20 favorite movies and I highly suggest watching it.

RResende This is not a good film. It's enjoyable according to a number of things you can get from many other films. Conventional comedy values built around romantic stories. Escapism in recognizable form for anyone vaguely used to Hollywood. But this is a little bit more than that. It's part of a trilogy of films featuring a trilogy of interesting artists: Boyle/Hodge/McGregor. This set of films was important for it established the basis of 2 interesting and important careers (Hodge in the meanwhile seems to have deviated from interesting stuff, let's hope he comes back). What they did was what one might call experimentalism, or even theoretical experiments leaked onto practical products. Of the 3 films, this is probably the less interesting. It's not especially entertaining, and even as an experiment it's not especially interesting. The point was to pick up a specific genre, romantic comedy in this case, and twist it or at least give it a new edge. The result falls a lot behind what, say, the Coens did in Intolerable Cruelty. Still, McGregor would become a powerful actor, one of the best, and Boyle is always worthwhile no matter what he does, and he's done some impressive stuff since. So, this film becomes a sort of an historical artifact if you want to do archaeological research of their careers.What you learn here is that from the beginning Boyle trusts his intuition, and that vein prevails over how he rationalizes his film conceptions. Those intuitions may be really powerful or come to nothing (like here), but he's always willing to take the chance, and i appreciate him for that, i'll want to see anything from him. And you learn that McGregor, already back here was self-conscious as an actor. He knows he's acting, so the question is not so much to be "real" (as an obscene amount of actors always try to) but to deliver the acting while acknowledging it. That's probably the more fundamental theme of the art in the last century. As far as cinema acting goes, Ewan McGregor may be its state of art.But this film, unless you place it in the perspective of their makers future, is pretty much useless.My opinion: 2/5http://www.7eyes.wordpress.com

Theo Robertson Film4 are showing a retrospective season of Danny Boyle movies and this was my first chance to catch A LIFE LESS ORDINARY . I had thought previously THE BEACH was the big Boyle flop but that dubious accolade goes to this movie which has a woefully unfunny script which proves that if a film is good it's down to the director but if it's bad it's down to the screenwriter . 28 DAYS LATER is a rather derivative , contrived screenplay lacking in internal logic and Boyle rises far above it to construct a stylish post apocalyptic drama/horror movie . But it's easy to crank up the thrills and chills in a horror movie . With a comedy it's far more difficult because if the jokes aren't funny then the whole movie fails due to this It's not so much the jokes that are a failure , it's the whole screenplay by John Hodge . It's painfully underdeveloped and reminds you of other films that are slightly superior ones like the Charlie Sheen vehicle THE CHASE or infinitely superior ones like A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH . It's impossible to know why Hodge needed to introduce a fantasy element because the two angels could have easily have been mere mortals though perhaps that might have reminded the audience of the highly regarded Coen brothers . Ironically enough you're still reminded of the Coen brothers regardless and what good screenwriters they are . You're also reminded of those Osamond shows with their cheesy , predictable sketches contain painfully obvious punchlines . For example kidnapper and victim go in to phone box , kidnapper phones victim' s father and in a foul mouth rant describes what he's going to do with victim if he doesn't get the ransom , only to finish by saying " Oh sorry I must have dialled the wrong number " . It's not helped McGregor's natural inability to deliver a comic line and if anyone's laughing at this point they must have changed the channel Boyle is on record as saying that the film in hindsight was " A bit too zany " and it's why it led to its relative box office failure but it's failures are down to reasons I've outlined above . Boyle did make his name with the darkly comical SHALLOW GRAVE and TRAINSPOTTING so he probably wanted to let his creative hair down a bit with a broader comedy that would appeal to an American audience . It shows what a great director he is that both A LIFE LESS ORDINARY and THE BEACH were flops and he was destined for obscurity till 28 DAYS LATER came along