ManiakJiggy This is How Movies Should Be Made

Thehibikiew Not even bad in a good way

WillSushyMedia This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

Melanie Bouvet The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

benjamin-twist This five part BBC drama is a bit like it's other flagship drama The Streets. That is well made, well acted with some interesting story lines but is confined by the Show's premise that all the characters live in the same street which limits what happens to them.Five Days is similar in so far as limiting the action to five days it gives little room for the story to breath. And the title implies that the action takes place over five consecutive days but it doesn't, so why bother? But what a disappointing story it is. Like the last series it starts off well with the discovery of an abandoned baby in a hospital and death of a young girl who jumped in front of a train. Was she pushed? Is there a connection between her and the baby? And we meet various characters who are on the train whose lives are connected in more ways than one.But as the episodes progress it becomes more apparent that they are going to have a hard job successfully tying up all the loose ends. It's it a bit far fetched to believe that the driver of the train is in a relationship with a woman who is seemingly responsible for the death of the person who jumped of the bridge. Also there is a lot of stodgy stuff about the Muslim faith and a couple of young men who have been to Pakistan for terrorist training. All this bogs down the plot rather than enhancing it and it's hard to see what message the writer is trying to convey. We get to the last episode expecting answers to all the questions raised earlier but a lot of these are mentioned almost in passing and you are likely to loose concentration waiting for something interesting to happen.The most unbelievable part of the last episode concerns the baby's Grandmother and her confused motives. She snatches the baby and takes him to the baby's mother who is a hopeless drug addict. Her plan seems to be that seeing the baby will force her to give up drugs and become a proper mother to the child. But the grandmother is also an ex-junkie and would know how difficult it is to come off drugs and anyway the girl dumped the baby in the hospital because she didn't want it. Also considering how manipulative the grandmother is it's hard to see why the baby's father would be so comfortable in her presence when they are both at the shopping centre with the social worker. She is the key to the whole story but her actions are explained in a few mumbled sentences at the end.All-in-all a great pity because the series has a good cast (especially Surrane Jones and David Morrissey) but in its attempt to be too clever it failed leaving this viewer with a slight feeling of being cheated.

robert-temple-1 This is a very engrossing BBC-TV mini-series which is loosely based upon a mysterious disappearance of a young mother, but the series is really more of a study of the assorted characters in the story, which lasts for five hours. It is thus very much an ensemble piece, where the wide variety of brilliant British actors and actresses can show off their talents. The actual characters portrayed are really 'the kind of people one does not normally meet', people so boring and nondescript that it is difficult to admire them. For instance, the lead character is a young husband (the one whose wife disappears) who has no job and no apparent interest in finding any. He lives off handouts from his parents-in-law. He was once in the Army but does not appear to have the slightest flicker of any ambition or any interests in life apart from doting on his small family. He is played by David Oyelowo, who is brilliant at the part, coming across as a totally sympathetic person, although his only activities for five hours are loving and grieving, which he does superbly, so that one wants to comfort him, as he is so obviously a nice guy. The standout performance of the whole series is unquestionably Penelope Wilton, who acts circles round everyone else in the story. She is simply incredible. She portrays a very unsympathetic woman, indeed the only character in the story who is all too familiar to everyone, namely an irrational, hysterical, self-centred, dense, querulous, blindly loving and blindly hating, elderly idiot-woman. Alas, alas, we know them too well. Wilton is one of Britain's finest actresses (see my review of her in 'Half Broken Things'). She takes a character who could have been two-dimensional and makes her four-dimensional. She is wonderfully supported by old pro Patrick Malahide, who plays her exasperated husband, and the pair of them set a high standard indeed for all the younger players. Janet McTeer, a spectacular actress when younger, has become a much less sympathetic type of person now that she is older, has coarsened in some way, and puts one off, but she redeems herself in the latter stages of the story by showing how brilliant an actress she can be when she has a chance by pulling off one of the most convincing and original drunk scenes I have ever seen on film. The big surprise is the enigmatic character Sarah, played with great depth and originality by actress Sarah Smart. She takes a character who could have been insufferably tedious and by sheer acting magic turns her into a deeply mysterious and intriguing person, about whom we wonder tirelessly for the entire five hours. She is so good at it that we end up wondering about Sarah Smart, frankly. I guess that's what happens when you really do your job properly, that people wonder where the character ends and the actress begins, if she knows herself, that is, and many do not. She has some deeply unnerving tricks with her eyes, which wobble and let us know she is unhinged, but we are not sure how or why, though we eventually learn that she had an extremely violent and traumatic childhood. Her mastery of ambiguous facial expressions is extraordinary. Rory Kinnear is amazingly convincing as an apparently hopeless fellow who lives with his mum and isn't up to much, but who turns out to have hidden depths. (I suppose most people have hidden depths, but do we want to plumb them, that is the question.) His mum is played very well indeed by Margot Leicester. A superb performance is given by Lucinda Dryzek, who plays a snotty, revolting teenage girl of the sort we all dread to meet, but who at crucial moments collapses in helpless tears and turns out to be pathetic, with all her arrogance just a pose. Three other children are also very good, Lucinda's friend, and her younger half-brother and half-sister. The younger siblings may be very dim indeed as characters in the story (they seem unable to say anything particularly articulate, being hopeless witnesses to the disappearance), with little to recommend them but their sweet natures, but that is conveyed to wonderful effect by Lee Massey as the boy and Tyler Anthony as the girl. Harriet Walter has a small role, but we do not get to see much of her, which is a shame, as she is such a fine actress that she was wasted here. One could go on, but one must draw a line somewhere. The series manages to be strangely fascinating because of the depth of portrayal of all these essentially uninteresting people caught up in a web of intense anxiety and suspense.

delgados129 If you don't mind having your emotions toyed with, then you won't mind this movie. On the other hand, if you enjoy British crime mysteries, following clues and seeing how they all logically fall into place at the end, you'll be very disappointed.Here are some of the logical inconsistencies that lead to that disappointment: * While the police utilize the CCTV cameras early on to gather clues about the mystery, the huge truck that stopped and blocked the children's view just before her disappearance doesn't get caught on camera. This is a critical piece of the mystery. It's inconsistent to have the car the children were in caught on camera and not the big truck that is so critical to the mystery.* The movie goes to great lengths to show the sophistication of the equipment in tracking down the children's movements but misses the opportunity to utilize the same sophisticated equipment is tracking down vehicles that may have entered the crime scene from camera-visible locations adjacent to the crime scene as part of developing clues.* In England, driving is on the left. The director goes out of his way to have the car at the crime scene park on the right, several meters away from the flower kiosk, when it could have easily parked immediately behind, or even on the side; as the huge truck did.* The police forensics team is so meticulous as to find a discarded cell phone in a sewer drain several miles from the scene of the crime, but can't find any blood evidence from the head injury right at the crime scene, even though they secured the scene just hours after the disappearance and with no intervening rainfall.* Search dogs were not used at all to find the missing children; this from the country that is well known for developing the hound dog for search and hunting.* It is illogical that such a highly publicized news story would not turn up the presumably innocent truck driver that stopped at the flower kiosk.* It is illogical that the mother would go to such extremes and expend so much effort to leave carpet fiber clues under her fingernails for her eventual murder investigators –even coaxing her daughter to do the same-- while she simply could not have crawled out of the unguarded mobile home. If she had enough sense about her to ask her daughter to get carpet fibers under her nails, she could of just as easily asked her daughter to call out for help or even leave the mobile home that was in a crowded residential park.* The suspect that abducted the little girl was portrayed as mentally slow/dimwitted --justifying his unknowingly drowning of the mother— but, he was smart enough not to cooperate with the police and also fully exercise his rights not to self-incriminate.There are more inconsistencies like this that will lead to a true sleuth aficionado's disappointment. 'Five Days' is a very weak British crime story.

bob the moo It is the middle of the day when Leanne Wellings stops to buy flowers by the roadside on her way to see her grandfather with her children. The children are in the car when Leanne goes missing. The kids abandon the car and search for her and it is many hours before grandfather Victor calls the police. Later that night Leanne's husband Matt and his stepdaughter Tanya raise the alarm properly and a missing persons investigation is launched headed up by DSI Barclay as the family implodes with hope and worry.Following on from the success of previous BBC/HBO crossover The State Within, this next joint effort was really pushed by the BBC, which maybe helped it get ratings but perhaps didn't help it when you look at the approach it takes across all five hours. The story is engaging but you do need to understand that it is not a cop thriller but rather a character story that is as much based on the mystery as it is on the emotional and personal impact on all those involved. I say this because I know many viewers were disappointed with this approach and I think it may have been because they assumed that the hype meant it would blow everyone away. And of course it didn't but what it did do was effortlessly draw me into the people and have me caring about everyone involved.Thus this is one of those dramas where it is not all about the resolution as it is about the overall drama. This is a good thing because the characters are all pretty well written throughout the five selected days and they are convincingly developed or broken as we meet them each time. This worked really well for me and the cast respond well to it. Some have seemingly stock characters with things going on outside this story while others are right in the middle of the pain and loss. Oyelowo turns in yet another strong performance as the husband and his emotional range in the character is impressive, but he is far from being the whole show. Wilton and Malahide both work well together as the parents. I didn't totally think Smart made her character work and, as much as I like Amuka-Bird as an actress, I'm not sure it helped anyone to have her walking round constantly with an air of surrogate grief. Bonneville is solid while Bonnard, McTeer and others are strong. The child performances are mostly good although Dryzek is the strongest of the three and stands up very well alongside the adult cast. Woodward is good but not given as much to do as I would have hoped.The downside of this approach though is that the actual story of the crime and the investigation is not as good as it perhaps should have been. Too often things rely on coincidence to move the case forward and I didn't like the way that many things happened while the characters are all within spitting distance of it – I appreciate the town is supposed to be small but not that small! The conclusion to the disappearances may also bug some viewers because it is in keeping with the way that it unfolded and, in my opinion, not that satisfying or convincing.Overall then a very good character drama that is sadly not quite as good as an investigation. The cast all rise to the material and are roundly good with the script. I'm glad I watched it because I did enjoy it but it is not as perfect as some of the gushing reviews around would suggest.