Incendiary (2008) Online

From the director of Bridget Jones' Diary comes a film about terrorism. If you think that sounds like a recipe for cinematic gold then you must be demented.

As you'd expect from someone who made such a wretched piece of fluff, the emotions here are laid on rather thick. This isn't a film that knows a whole lot about subtlety. They might as well have just issued a box of hankies at the door.

The film begins with an exceedingly cute child having fun with his mummy. He's so damn cute and so damn lovable that you know he's not going to make it through the film alive. And then when you realise that the film is called Incendiary, you know he's going to get blown into a million little pieces.

Now having your son die in a terrorist attack is bad enough, but the film decides to make it several degrees worse. First of all, the mother in this film is no longer that enamoured with her husband. Therefore their relationship is rather loveless. However, not to fear, a sleazy journalist played by Ewan McGregor pops up. And no sooner have they exchanged a few words than they're exchanging bodily fluids on the young mother's sofa. Crikey. And as they're humping and pumping, they have a football game on the television. And at this game are the woman's husband and young son. And would you believe it, as they're doing the dirty, the stadium goes ka-boom and it's goodbye husband and son.

After this you'd kind of think that the woman would suffer some pretty serious psychosexual problems. But this doesn't stop the woman from having sex with the head of the anti-terrorist unit (the woman's husband was in bomb disposal, so this guy was a work colleague). And this guy seems really nice. He just wants to look after her. Nevermind that he's dull as ditchwater and that he loves caravans. He's just a good, honest guy. Well, or so you'd think. I guess the woman should have noted the fact that the man has a beard, and as we all know, men with beards always have something to hide. Why else would they cover themselves in facial shrubbery? You see, the man knew that the terrorist attack was going to happen and did nothing to stop it. Oh, that's pretty bad, isn't it? You were cheating on your husband as he went up in flames and now you've slept with the man who could have stopped it from happening. Maybe those psychosexual problems will finally kick in.

If this all sounds far-fetched, it's because it is. But the film isn't finished with the nonsense. The woman strikes up a friendship with the young son of one of the bombers. Okay, this has potential for bonding and mutual healing. But no, there's a sequence where the two of them are at Waterloo train station. The kid is still unaware that his daddy was one of the bombers – he thinks he's just gone away – and as he's waiting for the woman to buy tickets, he sees newspapers with his dad's face plastered all over them. Needless to say he's a bit upset and begins behaving a little erratically. He then runs away. The police see this and because he's Asian and has a backpack, they take chase. The woman chases as well, and they all end up on an empty train platform. Every party shouts a lot, and as the boy reaches into his jacket, the police prepare to shoot. But as a marksman pulls the trigger, the woman steps into his sights and gets shot in the head by mistake. Holy Jean Charles de Menezes, Batman, the police screwed up again!

But don't fear. The woman only gets grazed by a bullet so everything is hunky-dory.

Amongst all this ridiculous melodrama there are a few good scenes. The best one is when the mother seriously begins to lose the plot and thinks that her son has come back. She spends all her time in the flat playing with him. She then leaves to get some food and the spell is broken when she actually has some real human interaction. When she rushes back her son is no longer there and she's devastated.

However, this scene leads directly to another one of the film's maudlin flights of fancy. In response to the tragedy, a barrage balloon for every victim hangs in the sky with a picture of the victim on it. This to me sounds like an awful idea. Could you imagine that? You're just trying to get over the ordeal and you look out of the window and see your little Billy grinning from the sky. Yeah, nice one.

And so the woman realises that her son is really dead and decides to visit his barrage balloon. And to do so she has to stand on a tall roof and teeter on the edge. Will she kill herself or not? Now the barrage balloons I hated, but we now have another one of the film's few decent sequences. We see the boy and the father talking about the Great Fire of London. The boy asks what they did back then, and the father says that everyone had a cup of tea. We then have a voice-over where the woman says that many people have tried to destroy this city but no one has succeeded. Every time someone tries to knock it down, we rebuild. And that's what she's got to do with her life. She's got to rebuild it. The film didn't deserve to generate any emotion, but a love of my home city meant that for once I actually felt something in this preposterous movie.

This film is about a woman who lost her husband and son in a terror attack. Her life goes into a mess as she deals with her loss and hunts for the truth.

I have mixed feelings for "Incendiary". On one hand, it is beautifully shot. Every scene is nicely planned and constructed. Camera work is great too. On the other hand, the plot is confusing and strange. The pacing is excruciatingly slow, with a lot of repetitive scenes (such as London burning).

I also think "Incendiary" is not focused enough, as it tries to deal with too many topics including grief, guilt, quest for truth and the road to healing. If the filmmakers only focused on grief and guilt, without the subplots of the anti-terrorist guy or the suspect's family, I would have enjoyed the film more. Despite of Michelle Williams' superb acting, I find "Incendiary" disappointing and boring.

i think the main problem with the movie isn't the movie, it's that people are going in expecting a thriller instead of a drama. yes the major plot points could be covered in 5 minutes.. but that's not the point of drama. your average thriller is about things that happen and happen to have people in them. this movie is about the people and how they feel and cope when something momentous happens. if you appreciate that you'll appreciate the movie better, or not watch it cos it's not something that appeals to you.. and that's fair enough.

As far as the film goes, Michelle Williams carries it well. The accent's fine and the various states she goes through as she tries to deal with what has happened never feel you leaving disconnected or not understanding how she got there.

McGregor is his usual charming self, tho his is not really a major part (likewise MacFadyen), this is a movie about the mother and so these two don't get an awful lot of screen time.

The one fault i'd say is that the passage of time is not particularly well expressed particularly right at the end of the film when what seems to be a present day Ewan is wearing the exact same outfit as in the next scene which must be set sometime after.

Regardless, it's a decent movie, but requiring empathy.. so if you prefer action flicks, watch something else.

I have seen a negative review on this movie and I have to say that I am very tired of people picking apart movies to show how smart they think they are! This was a tragic and beautifully filmed movie that reminded me so much of The Sweet Hereafter. I believe that some people have a hard time watching others go through tragedy and grief and are uncomfortable expressing themselves. This movie drew a lump to my throat the size of a golf ball and made me hug my son extra hard at bedtime. Michelle Williams gives another outstanding performance and Ewan MacGregor is, as always, a complete pleasure to watch on screen. This film will come out on DVD this year and I would urge anyone with a heart to embrace it.

A young beautiful woman (Michelle Williams) is trapped in an empty marriage tucked away in an ugly apartment block in London. Her pride and joy in her grey existence is her 4-year-old son. One day, as the two of them are at the football match, she seduces a slick journalist Jasper (Ewan McGregor) in the local pub. As fate would have it, they are locked in a lovers embrace, with the football match raging on behind them on TV, when the stadium going up in flames with a series of explosions. Her husband and son are both killed in the terrorist attack, leaving her broken and alone.

If you are now thinking that a film about the aftermath of a major terrorist attack from the director of Brigit Jones' Diary sounds like a recipe for disaster, then you are partly right. But it is not bad for the reason you might think. The film is, for the most part, an emotional roller- coaster - you could be crying your way through most of it. But not because of her grieving for her lost family. The bombs are just the beginning - she still has to endure a full load of unlikely events in the hour to come. She understandably loses it along the way as the story becomes so over-dramatised that it is just ridiculous (especially when you run the story back in your head afterwards).

Towards the end she enters a phase of grief hallucination and reconciliation with life. As the movie is neither funny nor exciting, this should have been the route to take all along. Concentrating on the mourning of the young mother, and perhaps even throwing in some guilt towards her semi-estranged husband. Her husband is just gone with his death. He is not missed nor is there any regret for his disappearance. Even for a semi-estranged husband this sounds a little harsh - she did worry about him, after all, so she must have felt something. It is also curious that they have no family, or friends who drop by to comfort her. A lonely marriage must have pushed them into some kind of a social circle, or a hobby, or at least the occasional phone call with their mothers. Was their life really that lonely.

The movie is clearly intended as a pamphlet against terrorism, by showing the human cost at the level of ordinary people. It also takes the time to "explain" the resilience of London in a voice-over. It is a little desperate to save a movie through nationalism, but can actually be fit in here, although it could have been better prepared, by, for instance, by making her a more integral part of London. This is no masterpiece, nor an entertainment jewel, and can easily be missed altogether. A pity, because it does have some potential.

I was at the premiere of this film last night at the Sundance Film Festival. It was obvious that Sharon was very nervous, but she was gracious and funny and I could see how that transferred to her film Bridget Jones's Diary which I loved.

This, however, couldn't be further removed from that. To use one of Sharon's own terms, as a friend put it, the whole film was "eggy". Overdone, pleading with the audience to cry for sympathy for the main character. I don't really even know where to start. The little boy was adorable and precocious, almost to the point of being cartoon-like. Michelle Williams' hangdog "I'm sad and smoking a cigarette" schtick soon became old.

The film starts out alright enough, with the setup of the husband who's always working, the connection between mother and son, etc. Suddenly she is in bed with the very on-point Ewan McGregor, and a bomb explodes at the soccer stadium where her husband and son are. This moment is good - frightening, shocking. But the heavy overlays of jaunting piano music and slow motion running or crying or whatever are so saturated that it's impossible to really connect.

As most of us know, symbolism is best when subtle and stripped down. Well be prepared to have it wacked over your head in this film. Her son has a stuffed bunny animal that he always carries, and after he's dead of course this becomes the representation of her son. They reference the bunny so many times that it's no longer a special memento. Once she starts stalking the son of one of the suicide bombers, it just fails to make sense any longer. She predictably bonds with the son out of nowhere (I literally leaned over and said "She's going to buy him a cricket bat" to a friend after the boy mentioned his dad was supposed to buy him one for his birthday...and lo and behold, she did) and then suddenly there's a standoff at the train station where she gets apparently shot in the head and has not a scratch to show for it.

An additional thing that bothered me is her character apparently has all these amazing traits that men are dying for. Ewan seems suddenly "turned around" from a womanizing yuppie telling her that she's just so different from everyone he knows. Her husband's old boss tells her she's an amazing woman and spews ridiculous romantic crap about "laying in a caravan with the dust particles in the air" or "taking all the hundreds of pieces of your broken heart and putting it back together". What is so remarkable about this woman? She's just gone through a terrible loss, but that has nothing to do with her character or personality. Nothing shown tells me that she is deserving of this attention.

This combined with the in and out narration, apparently letters dedicated to Osama Bin Laden, the hot-air balloon with the picture of her son, the underuse of the engaging Ewan McGregor character, the random relationship with the bomber's son, and the obvious "Oscar nomination" scene of Michelle Williams screaming "My baby! My baby!" all comes together for one totally over the top melodrama that leaves the viewer with no real connection to anyone. If they had stripped it down by about 90% it would be watchable.

It does make me sad that I found this film so unenjoyable, because it was obvious that the director was very nervous and had put her soul and time into it's making. However, I don't see any way to fix the many glaring issues there are. Instead of seeing this, I would recommend popping in Bridget Jones's Diary and enjoying Sharon Maguire in her best medium.

Having knocked us all out in 2004 in LAND OF PLENTY by Wim Wenders, here Michelle Williams proves that she is truly supernatural. She gives one of the most gut-wrenching performances ever seen on the screen. And for a Montana gal who had to brush the sagebrush pollen out of her hair before joining polite company, stow her lasso, and pretend to be civilised, how did she manage to master the accent and rhythms and patterns of speech, dress, and mannerisms of those real savages, the gals in those short tart's skirts who live in tower blocks in East London and are married to men who support Arsenal Football Club? (Ugh! Football! Makes me sick! And singing about a football club, how oafish can you get?) It all goes to show that Williams, like good wine, travels well, even though in this case it was from planet to planet. This film is so brilliantly written and directed by Sharon Maguire (formerly a television documentary film maker) that the combination of Maguire and Williams sets the cinema on fire and thereby justifies the film's title admirably. Excellent support is had from Ewan McGregor and Matthew MacFadyen as the two male leads, but all eyes are on Williams. The production values of this film are very high, and it is easy to be convinced that the big terrorist attack on Wembley Stadium has really happened, as the attack and the aftermath are all so real. However, this is not a film about terrorism, which is merely the backdrop, in the sense that world wars and civil wars have been for so many films in the past, from GONE WITH THE WIND to FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS to MRS. MINIVER. This is a film about people, but especially about Michelle Williams. Only a woman could have directed this. In fact, one is tempted to say that all films with terrorism backgrounds should be directed by women, because they are not tempted as men are to dwell on all the violence for its own sake. With a woman at the helm, this film becomes a people film, but a man would have strayed, taken more interest in guns and corpses and explosions (little boys going bang bang sometimes never grow up, especially when they have a budget and a cameraman handed to them). As a study of searing grief and despair, Williams has our hearts in her mouth, but don't worry, it isn't really a downer, it is simply so spellbinding looking at her and seeing into another dimension. She seems to be a tiny little thing, and it is almost inconceivable that such a small package can carry such a huge explosive power. This film really is an instant contemporary classic.

This cod mockney melodrama from the director of Bridget Jones Diary fails at every level. It's clearly a film involving working class characters made by middle class people with both characters and plot lacking any authenticity and credibility whatsoever. In fact, the basic premise of Bridget Jones is transposed to this disastrous attempt at making a serious drama. Instead of writing a diary she writes letters to Osama Bin Laden. Instead of getting caught in a love triangle between Colin Firth and Hugh Grant she gets caught in a love triangle with two equally wet englishmen, uncomfortably played by Ewan MacGregor and Matthew Macfadayen, and all this, after her poor husband and son have been blown to bits in an unconvincing attack on Arsenal football stadium whilst she was shagging the local taloid newspaper reporter! The mawkish sentimentality that ensues is unbearable. In a preposterous celebration of London's blitz spirit, the faces of the victims are printed on the side of WWII air balloons which float above the city in every shot. And Michelle Williams, who miraculously found her sons toy rabbit in the ruins of the football stadium, clutches it to her chest in almost every scene. I find it hard to believe that this ill conceived script ever made it past treatment stage, particularly when so many established UK film companies like CH4 were involved in its development and finance. I find it equally hard to believe that the film was selected to screen at prestigious festivals like Sundance.This film is a worrying indictment of the failings of a the British film industry.

If you like me saw the poster (and the IMDb genre listing for that matter) and thought that this was a drama-thriller, let me tell you that it's not.

Although there are some slight moments of suspense this is solely a drama film about grief.

They do throw in some other elements to it as well, some that works better than others but the true essence of the story is a woman grief after a great tragedy in her life.

It tackles the subject-matter rather delicate for the most part and it does feel rather realistic for the more part.

It's rather depressing though, but I suppose that is the point.

Michelle Williams impresses by the sole fact she's able to sustain a British London accent throughout the movie and not once ever slip into a American one, which is extremely rare with American actors doing films in foreign English speaking countries but she had it down to perfection from beginning to end.

She also pulls a good performance over all as well.

So yeah not a feel-good movie that's for sure but it sustained my interested reasonably well, even though I don't know if I'd watch it again.

Incredibly slow. Long periods when they didn't find dialogue so filled it with repetitive monotonous piano music. A plot with a good centre but too many twists or 'devices' to be believable. Because of the tenuous plot, characters are more difficult to relate to or care about. Too many themes / subjects.

So I didn't like it much ! I thought the above was a succinct review but now IMDb is making me write 10 lines, which is ironically similar to how I feel about the film actually given all the long slow panoramic shots over music while the actors look sad or longingly or suchlike. So yes this paragraph is just for that end, sorry everyone, but this review is less time than the film, so it's of some value. Ha !

I had never heard of this film, nor did I read anything about it on IMDb beforehand, so I had no expectations whatsoever when I sat down for it. By 20 minutes in, I was enjoying it a lot. Michelle Williams was putting on a London accent which seemed flawless to me. (Okay, I'm a Texan, what do I know about English accents?) The big event seemed to be done pretty well. The film is mainly psychological, about dealing with loss. Miss Williams does very well with this material, and indeed, her performance is the best part of the film. But when I got into the final third of the film, my enjoyment started to flag. The flashback scenes were way overdone, even though I get that it was the director's way of showing the character's break with reality. And in the end, the character's shocking naivete about the mindset of Islamic terrorists was extremely jarring. Overall, I liked the movie, but I am not sure that I could recommend it to anyone else.

Incendiary (2008)

A kind of British version of 9/11 that is interesting for its vision of a London-based terrorist disaster, but which is overwrought, sentimental, and sensational. It tries to temper this by making the heroine moodily (deeply) unhappy in her adultery (or unhappy enough to be adulterous), and by having the resulting relationship take on surprising seriousness.

And this is where the movie has some interest. I'm not sure Michelle William's role as the mother and bereaved is exceptional any more than Ewan McGregor is as the interloper playboy turned sensitive (and who has a really minor role). Both seem like functionary clichés. It's a serious movie overall, and increasingly sad. But it's loaded with tricks to make it catchy, including the whole unconvincing second half where an investigation takes place against unlikely odds.

The music is overbearing (drippy strings and piano), and the manipulations almost cheap (stuffed animals, pictures and movies of loved ones), almost like a quickie made-for-TV affair. Which is too bad because there are other aspects that are moving. It's a good idea to have the British visit this and try to empathize through a movie this way.

A giveaway to its motivations (and those of the director Sharon Maguire) is a voice-over at the end, as a baby is being born, that is a direct plea to Osama Bin Laden to stop training people to be violent killers. We all wish that would be so. So if this movie is just for Osama, fine. For the rest of us, it's nearly unbearably trite and shameless.

An awful waste of 1 hour and 35 minutes. Don't do this to yourself, unless you really enjoy pretentious melodramas with little or no story.

According to the producers, and IMDb, this is a "Drama/Romance/Thriller". Make no mistake - it is not romance, and most certainly not a thriller.

"Like watching paint dry" is an old saying, and probably as meaningless a way of spending time as watching "Incendiary". Still, many of us are likely never to have sat down for an hour and a half to watch paint dry, whereas we have all seen the clichées and the pretentious rubbish which makes up this utterly awful movie. We've seen it all before, though fortunately rarely in such a mindblowingly slooow pace and without virtually any story or message behind it.

I is usually a bad sign when, 20 minutes into a film, still nothing has happened, and the information conveyed would easily fit into less than a minute. In this case, it is indeed fully indicative of what's to come: more of the same.

The story as such can be told in it's entirety in a few sentences and scenes, which in fact it also is - the remainder of the of the movie just consists of endless, clichéd retrospectives, soul searching dialogs, marathon shots of facial expressions, you name it...

Some have criticized the plausibility and credibility of the storyline, very often a problem with today's movies, but that's hardly where this movie falls down - it's in the fact that the story could easily have been told in ten minutes. It would still have been pointless, un-interesting and without meaning or message, but at least it would have been over quickly...

A heart wrenching movie. Though none of us are free from grief and quilt, some may find this movie too emotional. But for all who venture here, you may find your mind pondering your own lives and loved ones and those closest to you. You may start to think just how fragile we all are. You may consider calling someone, writing someone or praying for someone. Some of you may take a closer look at world events, read a newspaper or for that matter avoid one. But if you watch this movie you will feel the need to preform some action of good faith, if not just looking at your own. I found the shocking scenes in this movie did not shock me and the sad thing is they should have. Tomorrow when I look out the window, walk down the street, have a cup of coffee. I will savor the moment with more awareness and thankfulness. As Leonard Cohen said "It's through the cracks that the light gets in"

This film has been maligned because the director previously directed a "Bridget Jones" movie. Yes, those movies were shallow, but this film "Incendiary" has a few decent points, and Michelle Williams is worth watching.

Basically a neglected housewife who's son and husband are in a soccer match in Chelsea when an act of terrorism is committed. The daily life scenes as we see her apartment and her husbands UN-glamorous job as a bomb prevention specialist are realistic. The beach scenes with her little boy are relate-able without being overly dramatic.

The "letter to Osama" suggested by a hospital nurse is a ridiculous statement to say to a grieving mother who has lost her son and husband. Especially in a random act of terrorism. No doubt anyone who has lost a loved one will agree with this. The grief Michelle Williams emotes is believable here, she is alienated and dissociated from the world around her.

Yes the scene with the stuffed rabbit is a ploy we have seen, but it is believable. A person in this situation is not going to sit in group therapy and want to share all the pain and horror they have just witnessed. The pain is at first internalized and sometimes hidden from the outside world.

The Ewan McGregor character, who has an affair with the grieving mother at the time the incident occurs, seems to be added in at the last minute and extraneous. Other than driving her to the scene of the bombing and visiting her once at the hospital he does not seem to contribute very much to the overall story.

The visuals are very good, the gritty streets of London and the building she lives in, versus the Welllington building of the upper class.

The story itself is worth watching and Michelle Williams gives a sympathetic and nice understated performance here. Don't discount this film. Recommended. 8/10.

A young mother sees her husband and four-year old son off to a soccer match. She then goes home and puts the match on the television. As she watches there are explosions at the stadium. A terrorist attack kills her husband, who she didn't much like anyway, and her son, who she loved dearly, along with a thousand or so others. Oh, and as the young mother watches this unfold on the television screen she is at that moment having sex with another man.

This seems to set up a story about the young mother's guilt and grief. And there's some of that. But there's a bunch of other stuff too, none of which really works. There are conspiracy thriller elements which go practically nowhere. There are romantic entanglements as a couple of men who should really know better try to swoop in on the newly widowed young mother. In a portion of the film which strains credulity to the breaking point we see the young mother reach out to the son of one of the suicide bombers. The film goes off in so many different directions that it ends up being quite a mess. The young mother manages to hold herself together remarkably well given the circumstances. For a while anyway. But eventually she starts to crack and when she does the movie cracks too. At this point it is beyond repair.

If there is anything positive to say it is that, working from a rather lousy script, Michelle Williams still does remarkably well in the role of the young mother. Whatever little successes this movie has belong to Williams. Ewan McGregor is at least passable as one of her suitors. As the other Matthew Macfadyen is a total dud and he also draws the shortest straw, getting the absolute worst of all the film's terrible dialogue. Some of the things this character says are just laughably, impossibly bad. He speaks in a way human beings simply do not speak. The film aims for melodrama but misses the mark. The story doesn't really engage and it moves at a snail's pace. A story more focused on the mother herself and the way she coped with this tragedy might have worked. But this movie gets bogged down as it veers off in other directions. Williams does the best she can but her noble effort can't save this dud.

Well Intentioned Post-Terror Musings on a Mother's Loss of Her Son (what grief there is for Her Husband is virtually absent) from, not one, but four, in tandem Suicide Bombers at a Stadium in London.

Extremely Heavy Handed and sometimes Incoherent and Rambling Story. Badly Edited, the Film seems Pasted Together from a Committee of Mentally Challenged Monkeys.

Things Happen without the Least Bit of Coherence (the middle with the Teenage Boy as one example) and the Triangle Romance is just Awkward and Distracting.

Michelle Williams in a Difficult Role is Ravaged by it all and spends most of the Movie completely Disheveled and Delusional, in Tears, Distressed, and Depressed. Then a Segment Pops Up where She is Completely Gone, Hallucinating and Detached from Reality.

The Biggest Problem is the Movie Never comes together and Appears Random and Rushed. The Music is just Awful and the Film is a Heavy Duty Downer.

It Needs a Finesse of the Heart and Soul. It Feels like it was made, Tossed in a Blender, and Released without Regard for its Deep Subject Matter and the Emotional Attachment that it would Demand from the Audience.

An adulterous British woman tries to cope with the loss of her husband and infant son to a terrorist bombing at a soccer match. This film is a complete disaster, failing on all levels. The main problem is a script that seems to have no rhyme or reason and becomes increasingly dreary. The woman suffers from delusions and has random relationships with a reporter and a colleague of her husband's, but none of it is the least bit interesting. Williams is certainly a talented young actress but this is arguably her worst performance. She sports a thick Cockney accent that may be authentic sounding, but is also annoying and nearly incomprehensible.

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.

INCENDIARY comes as a surprise release on DVD: did it even have a theatrical release? Based on a book by Chris Cleave and adapted for the screen by director Sharon Maguire, this little film is notable on many levels. First, the story is another look at the topic of terrorism, revealing the effects of these senseless catastrophes much like America's 9/11 tragedy on all players - the survivors of the victims, the survivors of the perpetrators, and the way so much of life changes in the wake of explosive surprises and the strength to survive in the aftermath of these traumas.

A Young Mother (an astonishingly fine performance by Michelle Williams) opens the film with thoughts and demonstrations of the love she holds for her young son (Sidney Johnson) while she copes with the too frequent absences of her husband Lenny (Nicholas Gleaves): Lenny is part of London's Anti-terrorism division of the police force. The feeling of unfulfilled desires by this isolated young woman are magnified as she watches her newspaper reporter neighbor Jasper Black (Ewan McEwan) across the street escorting yet another tipsy dolly into his apartment. Lenny leaves, the mother lovingly puts her son to bed, then she goes out to a bar where she encounters none other than Jasper trying to tempt her to his lair. The needy mother submits to Jasper's intentions and in a brief moment of desire succumbs to her physical needs.

Another day passes and as Lenny and their son depart for the soccer game, the mother is again willingly seduced by Jasper, only to have their assignation interrupted by an explosion at the stadium where Lenny and her son are watching the game. The guilt-ridden adulterous mother flees to the stadium where she is injured attempting to find her family. Now hospitalized with injuries she faces visits from Jasper as well as from her husband's co- worker Terrance (Matthew Macfadyen). Once released form the hospital she discovers the withheld name and picture of one of the suicide bombers responsible for the attack and deaths - and she learns that the bomber was a suspect being watched by Terrance who could possibly have prevented her loss. She learns the name of the suicide bomber's family, meets the bomber's son (Usman Khokhar) and wife (Sasha Behar) and eventually allows herself to meet them. The consequences of all of this information and chance meetings and the afterburn of her association with Jasper and Terrance (both of whom profess love for her) make for a startling ending, but an ending that for once helps us understand the psychology of our current world of terrorism threat and the need to heal and move on.

The performances are excellent, with special attention paid to the gifts of Michelle Williams whose perfect British accent will be a surprise to most viewers: this is a career altering role for her. The film develops slowly, deals with a lot of internal dialog, but in the end the effect is one of powerful impact. Highly recommended.

Grady Harp

I actually find myself pitying the clowns who don't get/won't get this film. They are either brain dead or dead at the core... because not being touched by the events strung together here is really not paying attention to the film or to the current state of things. The acting is superb by everyone, obviously especially Michelle Williams. It's a gutsy move to bring in an American to play this blue collar East Ender but she pulled it off with astonishing aplomb. The photography is sensational and helps the emotional story emerge... that is, if you're interested in a story that deals in emotions, which is to say people, which is to say drama. If you don't want drama or people or emotions this is not the film for you. Perhaps no film is for you, but fear not, there are video games for you.

What nonsense negativism from Steve "Cod" Carver in his post which does not even seem to be aware that the script is directly adapted from the celebrated Chris Cleave novel of the same name published on the same day as London's actual "7/7" attacks in 2005. This was one of my favorite's from Sundance 2008, and as an accredited film critic I am looking forward to the 25th anniversary edition in a few weeks time. I'm now sorry I missed "The Escapist" at Sundance which has also not yet been released commercially this side of the Atlantic. Incendiary is the first in a string of excellent Michelle Williams' performances, of which the best by far is in Wendy and Lucy. Comments here are always subjective. But when they slag others' professional judgments on the basis of little knowledge of either cinema or the world, they should be kept to oneself.

The thing I abhor most about selecting an unfamiliar movie from the rental or bargain bins is being lied to by the copywriters who decorate the DVD case with descriptions that have nothing to do with the movie. This film was the last straw and I will no longer choose movies I know nothing about based on the cover blurbs.

I was in the mood for a thriller - the most prominent word on the DVD case - and the promise of a gripping terrorist theme with a woman at the center of a police investigation was right up my alley. Instead, I was presented with a somber, slow moving, often disjointed story with weak character development and periodic attempts at artistic visuals. Though all of the acting was very good, it did not make up for the empty plot tangents that dragged down the pace nor did it improve the frequent sappy dialog.

This movie is one long whine about a lonely woman's grief and guilt, a supposedly very ordinary woman who nevertheless is the object of desire of many men and who has not even one relative or friend in the world. Despite the hopeful ending, a sad movie that really doesn't take you anywhere or reveal any new insights means I've wasted my time. Only 2 out of 10 stars for the acting and the cinematography.

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 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.