To what lengths would you go to
get your kidnapped daughter back? This is one of the many moral quandaries Graceland puts forward to its
viewer. For hard working family
man Marlon Villar (Arnold Reyes), the answer might shake any moral consistency
he may have once had. Marlon's job
consists of various shady clean up duties for his congressman boss as well as
taking the boss's daughter to school.
A routine traffic stop turns into a deadly kidnapping with Marlon's
daughter being mistaken for the high profile congressman's daughter. What
follows is a series of intense set pieces with a few plot twists in an
otherwise run of the mill crime flick.
Arnold Reyes shines in portraying
Marlon, a man driven the edge of his moral compass while doing or saying
anything to get back his daughter.
His constant state of fear and uneasiness that propels the story through
a series of cat and mouse games between the congressman, the kidnapper and
himself. One false step and his world
ends. Ron Morales expertly directs
with a sense of intense urgency that shows not only the grimy, immoral world
beneath this one but also a knack for shooting thrilling sequences that will
have your nerves tingling.
It's too bad that after the
initial few twists, Graceland becomes
a predictable, ordinary kidnapping movie with a finale that doesn't quite
deliver on the rest of the promising propulsive start. The film could have used
a little more punch beneath the surface level thematic material. There's some
rough stuff here particularly dealing with children, but it's all in service of
a story that just doesn't distinguish itself enough. Graceland is a fine film but one that is too straightforward and
doesn't present much of a challenge.
