The Place Beyond the Pines (2012)

I've heard for the first time about "The Place Beyond the Pines" quite a long time ago. Somewhere soon after "Drive" when somebody was saying on a forum that Ryan Gosling will redo his role, but on a motorbike. Time went over, the movie got an anemic initial release being an indie, but apparently managed to get enough interest to be distributed (in something like half an year) also where I'm located.

I didn't have high expectances, hearing that's either too long and boring, or that it doesn't have a beginning and an end, or that is overdramatized, and many others. To be read = somewhere in subconscious I was expecting to be pleasantly surprised. Well .. not really, but I can't say that it "invited" me to leave the cinema. I would prefer to say only this instead getting into more details about the subject, because I might have liked it better if I wouldn't have read a short review that gave away pretty much everything. I have to say though, not to leave it completely hidden, that the action idea starts with an attempt of a guy, the motorcycle rider above, to rebuild a life lived doing stunts, circus style, across the country. This comes after he finds he has a son in one of the cities he had been. The trailer is quite suggestive about how he tries to "straighten-up". About the role played in this by the other main character (Bradley Cooper), member of the police force in the respective town, I'll refrain from spoilers.

Probably the main plus is the cast. And I'll get over the names on the poster, and move to a secondary one - Ben Mendelsohn, who after "Animal Kingdom" and "Killing Them Softly", makes another exceptional complex role of a "law non-abiding citizen", apparently a pretty cool guy, but who in the end you don't know exactly where he's placed between malefic ( as in the deepest dark corners ) and just oportunist. For the rest, the movie is not bad. But for me it doesn't surpass the level of an ordinary life-drama. You could say fter you see it that's ok, that the story has also original parts which you don't see in every movie. Debatable .. There's nothing coming now to my mind, but I wasn't really surprised (and is not just to the fact that I've read the synopsis before seeing the movie). More, the idea that it doesn't have a head and tail is sort of true, especially regarding the tail. I don't know .. I still want to avoid telling too much, but it sort of fits even better on a real-life story that has nothing to show in the end except that life just goes on. My point is not that I would have wanted a spectacular ending or something like that (although to be honest although commercially, it would have probably raised the level of the movie ...), but .. I've seen/heard (and unfortunately also sort of lived ..) real life stories that are more .. "movie prone" than what we have here. At least the last part, which seems to a be an episode of a regular drama series, only that we don't have the following one to conclude the plot.

Rating: 3 out of 5