Shared Darkness

Blood Diamond is a tale of forged-in-fire scruples which peels back
capitalist complicity in the smuggled jewel trade. The film centers around
amoral, black-market courier Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio) and the
alliance he reluctantly forms with Solomon Bo (Djimon Hounsou), a local
fisherman. Solomon hides a large, pink stone he discovers while
toiling at gunpoint under rebel forces. He just wants to get his family
out of a refugee camp and, later, to rescue his young, brainwashed son
from said rebel militia. A daisy chain of mutual use, then, develops between him,
Danny and idealistic American journalist Maddy Bowen (Jennifer
Connelly). For the complete review, from FilmStew, click here.

Set in a remote Brazilian beach town and effectively playing
to the nativist instincts of a traveler’s worst nightmares, Turistas details the gritty misfortunes
that befall a group of young adventurers when they first get marooned and then
stalked in the nearby jungles. A tangled combination of thriller elements, travelogue
and more streamlined bits of gruesome imperilment, the movie successfully
wrings some novel tension out of its exotic besiegement before eventually unraveling
in its final third.

Young Americans Alex (Josh Duhamel), his sister Bea (Olivia
Wilde) and her best friend Amy (Beau Garrett) have traveled to Brazil
for fun and adventure. A bus crash on a twisting mountain road leaves them
uninjured but stranded, and here they befriend fellow international passengers
Finn (Desmond Askew), Liam (Max Brown) and Pru (Melissa George), the latter of
whom speaks the native Portuguese. Seeking to salvage their day rather than
simply waste eight hours waiting on a replacement bus, the group treks to a
nearby cabana bar and parties late into the night.

Each awakes, having been drugged, to find all of their
possessions gone. Wandering into a nearby town, they reacquaint themselves with
Kiko (Agles Steib), a friendly young villager who was among the last people
they saw the night before. After an incident with the townsfolk, the group
follows Kiko into the jungle — but is it to safety or into even further and
worse danger?

With Blue Crush
and Into the Blue, director John
Stockwell has shown himself to be adept both at showcasing toned actors and
actresses in skimpy attire, and at capably capturing action in and around
water. Here, abetted by cinematographer Enrique Chediak’s highly saturated,
rich chroma touch, Stockwell renders the film’s locale in vivid strokes. He also
gets an admirable amount of grounding detail right, such as the group’s
delicate barefoot negotiation of a rocky street after they’ve been stripped of
their passports and extra clothes.

Where Turistas
really comes off the rail, though, is in its murky final third. As it moves to
more explicitly define its threat, the movie takes on a de-saturated,
bleach-bypass look, which might be fine were it not eventually mixed with a
nightfall of harsh, crosscutting shadows. Jittery or willfully dark camerawork can sometimes
effectively feed a film’s tension or claustrophobia, as in 1999’s The Blair Witch Project or this year’s The Descent, for example. The third act
of Turistas, on the other hand, just
feels like a dark and stressed-out mess. The movie is additionally mightily
hamstrung — mortally wounded, really — by an utter lack of spatial clarity.

As mentioned, Turistas
isn’t as strictly interested in brutality as some of its genre brethren, but it
does evidence a hearty acknowledgement of recent commercial trends. Debut
screenwriter Michael Arlen Ross seeds his generally restrained narrative with a
few innovative moments of shock violence and gore. While not compulsory, per
se, early on these moments help give Turistas
a careening sense of possibility; one is involved in the story because it seems
un-tethered to convention. The envelope is eventually pushed off the table,
though, with one scene in particular seeming to exist for no other reason than
to guarantee some word-of-mouth regarding its graphic nature.

Similarly, recalling elements of David Marconi’s 1993’s
indie The Harvest, the movie also overplays
its hand a bit in the particulars of its third act torment. When the
antagonist, a sadistic doctor named Zamora
(Miguel Lunardi), reveals his intentions, this culminates with some unintentionally
amusing, politically indignant speechifying. (Fox Atomic, R, 89 mins.)