Incendiary (2008)

You should definitely read the book instead. Some of the characters of great importance for the story is either written out or payed no attention to in the movie. Which is really a pity and also twists the basic story so it will never reach the level the books does. I was well disappointed as well to see an American actress hold the leading role. A Dawsons Creek actress -how did they ever come up with that? When the book was to come out, the big attack in London occurred and due to the many similarities of the fictive story and what happened in real life, they had to take the retract the book and postpone it's release for a year or so. I very much recommend the book, but the movie will only ruin it for you.

This movie so wants to be an epic drama about the failure of terrorism to stifle the human spirit in the face of mankind's determination to ... uh ... have more babies and ... uh, make uplifting music and, uh .... babies' cries drown out hate and ... uh ....I don't want to mock this well intentioned movie too much. For one thing, Michelle Williams delivers a ferocious performance as a wife and mother whose grief will not be denied.Williams is simply "young mother." She has a boy toddler and a husband on the police bomb squad who comes home exhausted every night and falls asleep in front of the TV watching his soccer team, Arsenal. One night, she tucks hubby in on the couch and goes down to the local pub. There, she meets a reporter and they click. She is sex starved. They have sex.Next day, hubby takes the boy to the stadium for an Arsenal game, giving "young mother" an opportunity for another liaison with reporter. The two liaise, and are well into sex with the TV on the Arsenal game when a terrorist bomb explodes in the stadium, killing thousands, including her husband and boy.She races to the scene. Debris falls on top of her. She wakes up in the hospital covered in lacerations. As she heals, and gets out of the hospital, she goes on a quest. She is consumed with rage and guilt.This is an incredibly good scenario to begin a movie and it has a powerful actress to carry it forward, but somewhere along the way it decides it does not want to be a thriller or a melodrama or even a conventional drama, but an inspirational Hallmarkian story about the triumph of love.OK, maybe the cries of a newborn English baby will drown out the rants of mad dog jihadists. Or, perhaps, political issues are involved. Hmmm.

This is an odd but engaging film about the aftermath of a suicide-bombing in London that essentially blows itself up in the end. Just like a normal day shattered by a terrorist explosion, this movie gets you to invest a bit of your heart and mind in it and then breaks completely apart, leaving you stunned and wondering what the hell happened.Michelle Williams plays a young mother who's drifted away from her policeman husband (Nicholas Gleaves). He works in bomb disposal and the demand of his job consumes him, leaving her with just their young son (Sidney Johnson). The boy becomes everything to his mother. Well, not quite everything. What she can't get from her son, she heads out to a pub to get from a journalist named Jasper Black (Ewan McGregor).One day, Jasper and the young mother are having sex in her home while her husband and son are at a soccer match. They fornicate while the match plays on TV, stopping only when the soccer stadium erupts into smoke, screams and booming death. It turns out six Muslim suicide-bombers attacked the stadium and killed over a thousand people, including the young mother's husband and son.Now, here's where the story gets a little weird. Jasper discovers that the authorities are concealing the identity of one of the bombers, but doesn't know the reason why. After setting up that mystery, though, the film totally ignores it for a long time and dwells instead on the young mother dealing with her grief. She actually befriends the son of the hidden bomber (Usman Khokar) and even starts up a relationship with the head of London's anti-terror unit (Matthew Macfayden), who turns out to have had a crush on her for years. Then just as you think the movie has forgotten about the mystery and it won't be important to the story, it re-emerges and sets off a chain of events that lead to a final 15 minutes or so of the film that are so stupid and nonsensical that I couldn't believe what I was watching. Let me put it this way - Incendiary concludes with narration from the young mother, reading from a letter she wrote to Osama Bin Laden about how she's not really angry with him anymore and basically wishes they could hug it out. And that's not the dumbest thing in the last part of this movie.I've seen a lot of bad films with bad endings. I don't think I've ever seen a good film that ends as badly as Incendiary. As the story careened to a finish, I literally said out loud "You've got to be kidding me!" on several different occasions. The awfulness is magnified by how much I liked the rest of the movie. Michelle Williams is quite good as someone equally consumed by grief, guilt and longing. There's also a fairly wise theme running through the story where British resilience in the face of Hitler's missiles in WWI is held up as an example of how to deal with modern terrorism. Yet, all of it turns to crap because of Incendiary's atrocious closing.The best description of this film can be found in an episode of South Park. Eric Cartman spends the first half of the show with a giant, alien satellite dish going into and out of his ass. He describes the sensation as taking an enormous dump and then having that colossal turd shoot back up into your body. That's what Incendiary is like. It feels good and then it feels really, really, really, strangely bad.

This story begins with the voice of young woman living in London's East End telling us how she looks from her apartment into what remains of a row of older, well kept houses across the road, with envy. As it turns out, she is the mother of a little boy that seems to be her main purpose in living. The husband has a demanding job as a bomb diffuser, a dangerous job, indeed. The husband, an avid soccer fan, decides to take the boy to an important match. Little do they know the stadium is targeted for a terrorist bomb.As the husband and son go to the match, this lady is singled out by a seedy journalist that happens to live in one of the same houses she admires from afar. Little seems to stand in the way of a sexual session at her place where her man and son are away. As the couple is engaging in torrid sex, she overhears about the bombing at the stadium. The incident will play heavy on her mind when guilt and regret take her peace of mind.Based on a novel by Chris Cleave, the film evidently came out around the time when London suffered real terrorist attacks where people died and were injured. We cannot imagine what possessed Sharon Maguire, a director involved with light comedy to undertake the adaptation of the book. The result is an uneven movie that ultimately does not satisfy.The main attraction for this viewer was the cast. Michelle Williams, a fine actress otherwise, does what she can in a role that does not add anything to her career. Ewan McGregor, who was also paired with Ms. Williams in "Deception", is not too successful with the newspaper man he is supposed to portray. Matthew Macfadyen is completely wasted in a role that is so ambiguous to make any sense.