Afouotos Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

Keeley Coleman The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

Dana An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Walter Sloane Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

whpratt1 Enjoyed this great drama and thriller dealing with the killing of seven French Jewish people during World War II. Pierre Brossard, (Michael Caine) was present during the execution of these Jewish people and after many many years pass, Pierre is still being hunted down and goes into hiding within the walls of the Catholic Church in France and he is even given financial help in order to stay protected from being killed. One day, Pierre is driving his car and is followed by a man who was out to kill him and Pierre whipped out a gun and killed this man without any problems. This picture also shows how religious Pierre is because he is always praying and asking priests to absolve him from the killing he has recently performed. Tilda Swinton, (Annemarie Livi) and Jeremy Northam, (Colonel Roux) are both assigned to investigate this case which has been reopened and they both gave great supporting roles, it looked for awhile there might be some romance between these two, but they seemed to like flirting than getting into a serious romance. Michael Caine might be getting older, but he sure carried this film on his back, right to the very end.

bob the moo After the Nazi's were driven out of France, those who had collaborated were mostly rounded up and punished – many by death. However some escaped and were hidden, while others rose in power within the new regime. Pierre Brossard is one of the former and continues to live in fear, protected from those that would avenge his victims by his friends within the Catholic Church. However a close encounter shows that some group is closing in on him, meanwhile political pressure from Judge Livi and Colonel Roux's investigation into his whereabouts mean that he is quickly running out of friends willing to shelter him.It is difficult to know how to approach this film because it itself doesn't seem too sure of what it is trying to do. Is it a drama looking at the idea of fleeing war criminals? Is it a chase movie? Is it a character piece looking at Brossard? It is never clear because it does do some elements of each but it doesn't really do anything that well and I, as a viewer, was a bit confused about what I was supposed to feel or think during it. The story itself is OK, reasonably engaging but not having anything of interest to it. As a chase film I was interested and the themes helped it seem more than the sum of its parts but not in reality. The motivations of the characters are never that well developed; the Livi/Roux parts are dull and quite routine although the sections with Brossard are more interesting.It is a shame then that the film cannot decide what it wants to do with him – do we feel for him, hate him or just watch him? The film doesn't let us decide this in a good way representing the complex nature of the character, but rather just doesn't push out any ideas one way or another. Caine does well despite this and gives a good character a bit of depth. He is where the film is although he probably benefits from the fact that everyone else is quite ordinary. Swinton and Northam are quite ordinary and their parts of the film just seem put of place and half-cooked. Support from Neville, Bates, Rampling and others just about do the job but add little.Overall this is an OK film but nothing at all more than that. Despite the interesting and complex potential the film just delivers an ordinary chase movie and fails to do anything with the ideas and concepts inherent in it. Caine does well to produce quite a convincing character but he is alone in that, with the material and the rest of the cast failing to do anything that interesting. Not bad but not worth trying to find because it is nowhere near as good as one would have hoped.

neil_mc I dare say this film would have been much better received had it cast the film logically rather than have 'everybody's favourite Cockney' Michael Caine playing somebody called Pierre Boussard - I mean, Caine has never struck me as a "Pierre" somehow. And we can say for sure, that it couldn't have done any worse, a $22m financial loss is testament to that.Of course I realise the book is in English, but there is a big difference between the two mediums and very rarely does a film pull off a stunt like this, see 'The Hunt For Red October' or Jude Law's Russian misfortune in 'Enemy At The Gates'. At least The Statement didn't slip into having Caine and co. adopt Gallic accents - that would have been too much to bare.As for the film itself, it seemed a complete waste of police time to have half of the French PD chasing round after an OAP with a heart condition who'd been *ordered* to kill seven people 50 years earlier during German occupation. And for the film to set itself up as some sort of chase thriller, it very rarely gets past a stroll and the tension never really reaches the levels it should do.All that said though, there are far worse films out there and this isn't an altogether bad way to spend 2 hours. 6/10

Martin Bradley Norman Jewison's film version of a little-known Brian Moore novel posits a few interesting ideas - the role that the Catholic Church has played in sheltering Nazi collaborators from justice and whether it is right to pursue an otherwise penitent man for crimes committed fifty years earlier. Given the subject matter, a director with a record for top-notch entertainments, a first-rate cast and a script by the redoubtable Ronald Harwood, the film itself never catches fire, at best passing the time rather than actively engaging the emotions.One fault may be in accepting the high-toned, plummy British cast as French, (Tilda Swinton gives a terrible performance as the judge on the trail of Michael Caine's war criminal). On the plus side, Caine himself, Cockney accent notwithstanding, gives a superlative performance as the hunted criminal, casually out-classing everyone around him.