Diagonaldi
Very well executed
Reptileenbu
Did you people see the same film I saw?
Livestonth
I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible
Doomtomylo
a film so unique, intoxicating and bizarre that it not only demands another viewing, but is also forgivable as a satirical comedy where the jokes eventually take the back seat.
Claudio Carvalho
In the countryside of Italy, there is a feud between two families of kidnappers and the boy Vito (Manuel Colao) escapes from the slaughter of his family by the other family hiding under his bed. Before dying, his father advises him to warn his older brother that is hidden in a cave. When Vito arrives there, he finds his brother and a boy called Simone that had been kidnapped by his family dead. He finds a backpack with Simone's address in Rome and he decides to travel to Rome to meet his cousin Orlando (Lucio Zagaria) to flee from the killers that are hunting him down. Orlando gives a pack to Vito to keep for him and he puts in the backpack. Soon Orlando is murdered by the killers and Vito decides to seek out Vito's parents. When he meets them, the disturbed mother Marta Rienzi (Francesca Neri) wants to keep Vito with them, while her husband Davide Rienzi (Jacques Perrin) does not believe in him and decides to pay the ransom to retrieve his son. "La corsa dell'innocente" is a great Italian thriller based on a dark period of Italian history when there were abductions of wealthy people and even politicians. Through the long journey of an innocent orphan victim of a war between two families of kidnappers, the director Carlo Carlei exposes the drama of a family that had the only son kidnapped by a gang. In addition to the great story and performances, the film shows beautiful landscapes and monuments in Italy together with a wonderful music score. My vote is seven.Title (Brazil): "O Vôo do Inocente" ("The Flight of the Innocent")
arzewski
Although from a cinematography the production is good, the story and the actors are in doubt. First the story: it is about a kid from a crime family in the deep south that escapes from a deeply agrarian society to the heavily services-oriented north. Well, sorry to tell you, but the deep south as it is mythologized in the Godfather movies, doesn't exist anymore. Everybody has a cellphone now, nobody wants to be a Sheppard anymore, everybody wants to have an office job. The story is highly simplistic and idiomatic, kind of a cute story of a sweet looking kid with bad guys around him. Then the actors: the parents of the kidnapped child are "acting" the part that it is so obvious. When they see the child's school backpack, the knee to it, pick it up, and embrace it. So obvious, that it is classic "B" movie, and so predictable, more for a melodrama aired in soap-opera afternoons. Even how the director directed the shots has some unnatural feel: when the kid emerges from the crypt in the cemetery, he is made to turn his head slightly and then express surprise to discover there is a vehicle. It is as if the kid didn't have peripheral vision. Such scene direction by putting emphasis on frontal screen scape is typical of television direction of simple and uncomplicated easy-to-do productions. To have it here just shows how simplistic that was. But it was the only time it happened, otherwise, the other scenes are more dynamic
Gerald A. DeLuca
(Plot spoilers ahead.) Violence erupts in a shepherd's field in the Italian region of Calabria. Several men are shot and killed. Later the entire family of the men responsible for the slaughter is itself brutally wiped out in a revenge massacre, except for the young Vito, hiding under the mattress of a bed. He spends the rest of the movie evading his family's murderers, who need to get him out of the way.Vito realizes his own family was part of a kidnapping crime involving a young boy (son of wealthy Sienese parents). The two murderous and murdered crime families had clashed over the issue. The kidnapped child has been killed, but the surviving criminals still want to collect the ransom, asserting that the child is alive. Vito runs away, on foot, by train and truck, any way he can, seeks sanctuary with a relative in Rome (and his girlfriend), until he too is killed. He is questioned by the police, sent to a safe haven, apprehended by a gang member, escapes, continues his noble quest to seek the parents of the slain boy, to tell them what happened, to return to them the ransom money he had found, to tell them not to pay a ransom because their son is dead. At heart he is engaged in a quest to seek new loving replacement parents, to become a substitute son to "replace" the son the Sienese couple has lost.
He finds the family's home, with information found in the kidnapped child's bookbag. He barges into the house. The lost child's mother (Francesca Neri) finds this young intruder, takes a liking to the lad, going so far as tenderly bathing the boy and outfitting him with her missing son's clothes. The father (Jacques Perrin) refuses to believe his boy is dead, and negotiates with those still seeking the ransom. This final confrontation between father and criminals causes Vito to be nearly killed
but because of him the villains are subsequently snuffed out by the police in a final violent shootout.Vito dreams of a world where all can live in harmony, children are safe, and blood feuds are unknown. Would that were so. This is a beautifully made film with moments of great excitement and tension and sudden bursts of extreme violence and slaughter that look like out-takes from Sam Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch." Nevertheless, there is a tenderness at the core of the film, which is often very lyrical, sometimes excessively so in long-winded dreamy evocations that pop up from time to time
and at the ending. In short, it's a good thriller, with a humane dimension, on a relatively rare topic, the Calabrian Ndrangheta and its record of child-kidnappings.Performances are uniformly convincing with the remarkable Manuel Colao as the sweetly poetic and shrewdly cautious youngster. Jacques Perrin and Francesca Neri as the kidnapped kid's parents are perfect, and Federico Pacifici is frightening as the deranged scarfaced killer. The direction by Carlo Carlei, whose first film this was, is top-notch.
I used to show this film to high school students of Italian, despite the R-rating (for violence) and it invariably went over very well with the teen audiences. It is of interest to note that the 2003 Italian film "I'm Not Scared" ("Io non ho paura") by Gabriele Salvatores, has a story with a number of similarities to this one.
jtur88
This film was a bit too Disneyesque for me. The requisite beautiful child, equipped with intellect, wisdom, incredible luck---everything but a dog. With three years of school, he reads remarkably well. Fresh from a Sicilian olive orchard, he's street wise enough to have Rome eating out of his hand. He's the only target that's too small for the bad guys to hit unerringly with every shot. To make matters worse, befouled with needlessly explicit violence, which kicks it out of the Disney Channel, straight into Action-Max.