Five Fingers (2006)

Five Fingers (2006) has Ryan Phillippe and Laurence Fishburne as the two leads. Basically, this is a psychological/suspense/spy movie. Phillippe plays Martijn, a blue-eyed blonde Dutch jazz pianist who will travel to Morocco, to set up a food program. Fishburne plays Ahmat, his Muslim terrorist interrogator.

Also on board is Touriya Haoud as Saadia who is Martijn’s Dutch Moroccan girl friend, Gina Torres as Aicha who plays the helpful female on Ahmat’s staff, and Colm Meaney as Gavin, a tour guide to help Phillippe’s Martijn navigate through Morocco.

To give you an idea of what to expect – Martijn is a jazz pianist. He has Saadia as his girl friend. We will see them romp and play on one of The Netherland’s idyllic North Sea beaches and we learn he will soon travel to Morocco to help set up a food program. Ostensibly it is a food charity to help the poor in third world Morocco.

He will hook up with his guide Gavin, and they depart from Amsterdam’s Schilphol Airport. From Rabat, they head out on a cross-country bus toward the Rif Mountains. While en route, both Martijn and Gavin are hijacked off the bus, rendered unconscious, and when they awake, they find themselves chained and manacled in an unused industrial factory or warehouse.

Fishburne as Ahmat believes Martijn to be a CIA Operative on a mission. He believe the food program is just a cover story. The interrogation begins. Soon the psychological torture become actual and physical torture. Gavin will be dealt with a certain finality, and Martijn is going to start losing his fingers one by one.

It is a battle of wills, of intelligence, and one of courage under the harshest of circumstances.

While this is a movie, as most of it is shot within the confines of this abandoned factory, and with the small size of the main cast, one can easily imagine the screenplay as a stage play. Directed by Laurence Malkin. and written by Malkin with Chad Thurmann the small confines serve to amp up the drama rather than simply confining it.

Contagion

After seeing Contagion today, I thought long and hard about the peanuts sitting in a bowl on the bar next to my drink. This new film directed by Steven Soderbergh, and written by Scott Z. Burns is described as an action thriller centered on the threat posed by a deadly virus and a team of doctors contracted by the CDC (Center for Disease Control) to deal with the outbreak. If you think that this film might remind you of the 1995 film called Outbreak with Dustin Hoffman, Kevin Spacey, Renee Russo, and  Morgan Freeman – you’d be correct.

I think the term action thriller is a little misleading. There’s not really a lot of action and it isn’t really a thrill ride either. What it really is a horror story that could become true tomorrow or at any other time in the future. Only in this horror story, the monsters aren’t visible.

In fact, there already have been plagues, and diseases that have spread rapidly. The horror is that it can come at any time, and in anyplace on the globe. That is what is so frightening.

The film tells us that an average person touches their own face 2 or 3 times a minute all day. That’s 2-3 thousand times a day. Every day. The film tells us that every day contacts with other people like shaking hands, picking up a glass, handling a door knob, or a pole on a subway train or a bus, or even handing someone a file, or money, or a credit card then receiving it back might result in the transmittal of a disease.

Gwyneth Paltro as Beth Emhoff calling a friend in Chicago. She's just got off the plane from HK.

The film opens at Day 2. Someone we know (the actress – not the character) has contracted the disease. She’s unaware – but we know. Part of the reason is that this film’s title is Contagion, and she looks and acts sick, and the other reason we know is that the blasted trailer told us as much. This is Beth Emhoff played by Gwyneth Paltrow. Within a few minutes of film time, she’s weakened, collapsed, rushed to a hospital, then dies.