Proof of Life (2000)

Despite the obvious ending being reminiscent of "Casablanca," which is a great film, "Proof of Life" held up for the most part with A LOT of action--guns, muscle, and physical cruelty. Crowe is mostly always good, but Ryan surprised me in this. I found her multi-dimensional, able to shake the cutesy business that she usually plays, and really good as a quite desperate wife who has some issues with her world-hopping engineer husband. Morse was believably chauvinistic early on (before the kidnapping), and quite remarkably believable as a desperate hostage. Crowe was solidly heroic, not a Humphrey Bogart, to be sure, but certainly someone whom Ryan as Alice would remember for a long time. Certainly Terry and Alice never had "Paris" to remember, but there were good vibrations between them as Crowe plotted to save her husband.

Fmovies: Maureen O'Hara stars in a movie where her husband gets kidnapped those damn commies in South East Asia so she hires tough and dashing soldier of fortune Clark Gable to save the day

That's not the cast or the location of PROOF OF LIFE but it does have a very similar plot . Did someone mention this was a 1940s matinée blockbuster ? Just curious because while I was watching the movie I was struck by how old fashioned everything felt . Russell Crowe plays an Aussie who served in the SAS and saves a Frenchman from the Chechens in the opening sequence , but you could have had Gable playing an American paratrooper saving someone from the Red Army on the River Elbe in May 1945 . Different actor , different period of history , different enemy but still the same basic story with the action switching from Europe to say South East Asia in 1950

That's not to say PROOF OF LIFE is a bad film . It's not and I found it mainly entertaining though perhaps a little too long . It's just that it is so old fashioned that you can see where the predictable story threads are going to begin and end . You can't deny that both the cast and action scenes are good , it's just that you also can't stop thinking it would have been better if it'd been filmed in monochrome and directed by Michael Curtiz with no bad language or sexual references

I was impressed by Proof of Life and would only make one comment. In most movies, the plot is tightened up to be fast-paced, convincing, make you identify with and care about the characters, and even contain a little moral or have something to say about the human condition.

When a film like Proof of Life is based on a true story, there are limits to this. The worst example I can think of being A Civil Action, which I'm sure is true to the story but the ending was not satisfying and deflated the entire film.

So it's definitely worth seeing, but it's a little slow, and like real life the there is no consistent "tone" to the plot twists. (The film does not fit neatly into one genre throughout.)

Who should see this film:

-- Action buffs who won't mind that only some stuff blows up and the film is a little arty

-- Drama fans who are curious about the topic, but who are not expecting a romance and won't mind a little violence

-- People who'd like some gritty realism concerning Latin American civil uprisings

I give "Proof of Life" a 7 out of 10.

Proof of Life fmovies. According to the director's commentary on the DVD, Meg Ryan demanded (and got) significant rewrites to her character. Maybe Meg should stick to acting because her character is pretty unappealing. When her husband's humanitarian engineering project is unraveling and he's terribly upset, what does she do? She complains about their life traveling around the globe (a very curious scene because one of Meg's rewrites required her character to be rewritten from a country-club wife into a social activist), dredges up her miscarriage which she blames on her husband (apparently because it happened while they were both voluntarily in Africa working on aid projects), and essentially tells him to take her back to America. When he offers to do so, she reverses course and rejects the offer. After the husband is kidnapped, Meg (almost immediately) starts to fall for Russell Crowe though somewhat later she slaps HIM in the face when he's only trying to get her husband back. Finally, when the husband is rescued and returned to Meg, she looks about as thrilled as someone presented with a stinking fish. Yikes! We should be happy at movie's end but I couldn't stop from thinking that the rescued kidnapee had gone from the frying pan into the fire.

Its an OK movie overall. There is no arguing that Russel Crowe has some charisma in this film. And Meg Ryan... is Meg Ryan and really not a good fit. Overall not anything to get that excited about. But the action sequences, both when Peter is captured and the film ending hostage rescue sequence in my opinion are some of the greatest and most accurate in film. Not perfect, this is a movie so some creative/dramatic license was taken, but way above par compared to most any other film I can think of with very rare exception. Its pretty clear that they had a rare combination of fantastic military consultants along with a director and cinematographer willing to listen and make the most of it. Tactics, equipment, effects (with obligatory gasoline added to explosions...), even hand signals, how the guerrilla's operate... Spot on! Quite the rarity and very refreshing.

Really can't say enough good things about the action sequences. Movie is worth seeing just for this. The rest... meh.

What happens in real life will inevitably have an effect on the reel one. Tom Cruise learnt that with his strange antics in real life - his screen one suffered with a less than expected stellar box office for M:I:3 despite positive critical reviews. Way back in 2000, Russell Crowe and Meg Ryan learnt that too, with their rumoured romance while shooting this movie, one of the many reasons resulting in this becoming a box office bomb.

I felt that it was not a bad movie actually, given the story which I found interesting in the first place, for its extremely distant relation to what I'm doing, and being an action adventure movie, it works with its fair share of big action sequences.

Russell Crowe plays Terry Thorne, a consultant in the Security and Crisis Response Unit of Luthan Risk International. His job is to negotiate the safe return of Kidnap and Ransom (K&R) victims around the world, and of course, this brings him frequently to where the action is, during the payment of ransoms and the extraction of hostages. He yearns for a management role, but as always, if you're an excellent field operative, you're played to your strengths out there.

Which brings him to his latest client, Meg Ryan's Alice Bowman, whose husband Peter Bowman (David Morse), an employee with the biggest international oil firmed, gets kidnapped by chance during a raid in Ecuador. There are numerous scenes in the movie to perk your interest in this much behind-the-scenes industry of K&R, the terrorist(?) groups' motivation, and how the entire business is conducted, with the engagement of peers as well as the involvement of shady government personnel.

There are many fine touches that might go unnoticed, like how network of contacts and peers are milked, cooperation extended, the wheelings and dealings of large multinational corporations, and politics in general. But the focus moves quickly towards a micro one, that between Thorne and Alice Bowman, as he accomplishes to build her trust in him that he's the best in the business and knows what he's doing.

Perhaps this is one of the rare movies that allowed Crowe to be an Australian (and keep the accent) in a Hollywood production. His Thorne is oozes enough machismo to carry the action through and is credible enough to be believed as a veteran in the business. Meg Ryan this time round has a more serious character to play, albeit at times a weepie one, steering well clear of the pretty ditzy blonde comedic roles she has become accustomed to. They had probably shot some love scenes for this movie, but I suppose the bad press resulted in those scenes ending up on the cutting room floor. The romance between the character was also almost squashed out, save for the out of place suggestion of a strong physical attraction which rears its ugly head in the second half of the movie, slowing the pace down a little without much mature development. I thought that should it had been removed entirely, it'll probably end up a stronger movie, with Thorne more in character as a mission driven individual.

The first David, David Caruso, is finding a new lease of life back in television with CSI, since branching off to movies after NYPD Blue didn't augur too well for him. I thought his performance here was nothing much to shout about though. However David Morse, who usually plays supporting roles, put up an adequately engaging Peter Bowman as an executive caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, and examines the fear and desperation of a man