Restitution

This makes a great movie...if you are Lois Lane or blind. The film starts out with insurance investigator Brian Spikes. After they build up his character, he is murdered and blamed for the murders of all the people he was investigating. Later Alex shows up to investigate the murders for a true crime novel. Tom Arnold plays the neighbor and gives us the needed comic relief. Mena Suvari is a bar tender who supplied the eye candy. The film twist wasn't difficult to figure out. In fact shame on you if you don't. It was a fair crime detective movie that moved slowly. Most of the film was a drama as opposed to the thriller it pretends to be. F-bomb, brief sex, no nudity.

My wife and I watched this movie New Year's Eve day. This action movie seems to start slowly. Mark Bierleim portrays Bryan, an average Joe who muddles along as an insurance fraud investigator. Mena Suvari plays bartender, Heather, whom Bryan charms after playing the incredible piano music of Chopin. After being yelled at, chased, and later shot at, Bryan decides to quit the insurance fraud business. His boss drugs him and he finds himself chained on a pier with some bad guys who toss him into Lake Michigan. A year passes in which the people Bryan had investigated are killed and he is implicated in their deaths. Crime novelist, Alex Forester, shows up researching the book he is writing on Bryan's murdering these people. Everyone he talks to ends up mysteriously dying and the film quickly becomes fast-paced and interesting. Tom Arnold plays Alex's neighbor, a sweet, nervous, too-talkative retired marine who is always in the way. The movie ends with an unforeseen twist. While researching this movie online, I discovered it cost only $2.5 million to make. The cinematography was a little shadowy, but my wife liked it and the Midwestern setting lent it familiarity. All-in-all, we enjoyed this fast-paced (after a slow start) movie.

Seriously, Tom Arnold was the whole movie...the star was a boring out of shape very average looking guy..that looks like he works at Sprint or Verizon....seriously my first thought was, " oh, great another Canadian B movie...something to fall asleep to " The music awful, acting was crap, choppy filming... I agree with the first 3 reviews Tom Arnold cracked me up The leads sneakers were so wrong for what he was wearing and he moved like an out of shape 35 year old first day at the gym Personally, I watch more movies than the average person and I know a great film when I see one... This is the type of movie I will watch at 3am when I can't sleep or when I can't watch my favorite movie, "Tower Heist" for the 7th time ....but after seeing this, I don't mind watching Tower Heist one more time

I just finished watching " Restitution " and was blown away by the twist ending. Maybe my brain was on standby because of it being a Sunday afternoon and all, but I did not see it coming. I was also shocked to see how many rated this film so poorly. Sure Bierlein is no Pacino, but to write, produce and star in this film is quite impressive, considering how intriguing it was. I was pulled into the plot line immediately and never looked back. Mena Suvari and Tom Arnold were exceptional and it was nice to see C. Thomas Howell again. I won't spoil the plot for anyone who might want to check this movie out, but I will say this movie is not what it appears to be just like some of its main characters. A captivating murder mystery with enough action and plot twists to keep you enthralled for 100 plus minutes!!!!

Greatfully NO CG. Realistic. Unpredictable. Likable Characters. It was more surreal that real, but what do you expect--it was Detroit. It was not overly verbose. I don't expect it to get an Academy mention. Well written, acted, and filmed. Original and entertaining. Direction and cutting were crisp - did not leave any gaps The pace was perfect. The ending was perfect. Camera work was not distracting - no typical chase scene. Had a lot of context. Lots of wide shots - little character lock- in which gave it sense of reality. Not a lot of foul language. Loose ends were knit together at the end. Not a lot of blood. Nobody could have been offended watching the movie. Fun to cheer the white hats and boo the black hats.

Uh?....eh?...what?.... This is my fault. I can't stop a movie after a few minutes. So most of this very bad feeling is 'cause of me. And this startling clunker. I've seen bad movies. Movies that make you angry. And this rates up there with them. But you don't do this bad unless you are doing it on purpose for some really strange reason. Mental illness? All that money down the drain. I know actors have to eat like everyone else. But you didn't have to do this. How 'bout a revenge movie where you talk your nemesis into financing your really bad movie and it's this one? I'm forgiving enough to actually admit that Tom Arnold has done some decent acting in the past. But he was bad and probably the best thing in this at the same time. The two bright spots were some decent cinematography and a good final fight scene. That's where I awarded the 2 points. But the pain, oh the pain! An amazingly stupid story where this guy is framed for several murders to cover-up the dealings of the bad guys. He's then tossed in the river alive. (Just shoot him? Oh no!) Then his friend arrives a year later to investigate the situation. Bad scene, bad scene, bad scene. The friend's body was previously discovered. Bad scene, bad scene. Good fight scene. THEN the friend and the framed friend turn out to be the same guy! He apparently survived being dumped in the river and then spent the next year preparing himself to come back and avenge...solve....I don't know. But he left Mena Suvari floatin' the wind for a year? And I have a few more questions. If the "hero's" body was found, who's body was it? Why did he dig up his own grave if he knew it was empty? What exactly were the bad guys doing? Drugs? Did they bother to try and explain? 'cause I'm not going' back in there to find out. Why were all the bad guys doing their bad guy activities in broad daylight with plenty of witnesses around? Was workin' nights overtime? In what reality was it a good idea to let the "hero/lead" actor anywhere near the set (he's also the writer and in another movie he wrote)? Oh dear Matilda he is bad! Being a bad writer wasn't enough. Absolutely he had pictures of the director with a goat to get that part. In a bad movie with bad acting he outstripped all of the other cast. I'm not a good lookin' man but could easily sell the part better than he did. He looked like a bad, over-the-hill comic. There are a lot of things in life that I don't understand. George W was elected twice? Obama and Romney (at this moment) are runnin' neck and neck? And someone read this script and said "okay, let's do it" and wrote a check, too? Now I have to get an industrial strength shredder that will tear through a DVD. (I'm not going to be the one responsible for anybody else ripping 101 minutes out of their life.)

When I tried to see why some people had a lower opinion of the movie than me, some of the reviews complained that the plot made no sense, but I saw fewer plot holes in this movie than I did with Hard Candy, another movie I just saw recently. I'll get into my review first and then cover some comments about other reviewers' complaints. From a story point of view, I thought it was an interesting enough twist. Acting was OK. OK, I'll have to agree with one of the reviewers that perhaps Tom Arnold did shine the best with his typical Tom Arnold type of character (annoying but somehow likable). To me, I would say the biggest complaint I had about the movie is that it had a Made for TV feel to it. Part of it was the script where it was a partial comedy with Tom's character, but a type of crime thriller, too. However, what gave it most the Made for TV feel was the directing/camera handling. I also just saw the movie Colombiana recently, and it's day and night difference between the two movies how to give a movie the "big screen" feel. With this type of directing, it's not surprising that the actors were able to do more than just a passable job. *** SPOILERS BELOW *** To comment on some of the reviews which said that the movie did not make sense, one reviewer complained about the doctor being brutalized in broad daylight. If the viewer had been paying attention, the two thugs were simply "escorting" the doctor, most likely to a boat where they can dump him in the middle of the river. They didn't start roughing him up until they got toward the end of the pier where there was no one else around. Perhaps to give the story line the benefit of the doubt, this is when they needed to "convince" the doctor to get into the boat. However, since Alex came along, they decided to just shoot the doctor right there. Actually, this makes sense since if their objective is to kill the doctor, it would be a lot dumber to not finish the job just because someone caught on to what you were doing. Now, the scene itself was a bit odd because Alex was shooting and it wasn't clear if he was just shooting, not really aiming at them, because he didn't know what else to do... Or in case he was aiming at them, then he didn't seem to care whether he accidentally hit the doctor or not. So this scene could have been better planned, and there were others as well, but to me, it didn't detract from the enjoyment of the movie since I already was in the opinion that this had a Made for TV feel to it. Another reviewer complained that when Alex appeared, people started dying...? I am assuming this is what he meant and not when Brian first appeared. If he meant Brian, then that is one of the reasons they pinpointed the murders on Brian. But if the viewer meant Alex, technically speaking, Alex did not start killing people until the end. It was Tom's character who killed the first guys after Alex's arrival. For the reviewer who complained about the role of an insurance fraud investigator... All we know is that Brian was hired to videotape these people. Perhaps in a real fraud investigation, there are different people who have different roles, one of which is the person who does the videotaping. But anyway, as we find out anyway, he was not hired to do real insurance fraud investigation. This was a down-on-his-luck kind of guy who was taking any job he could get... so he was told to videotape under the pretense of fraud insurance. Since we find out it was not fraud insurance, then there doesn't need to be any connection to reality to what a real fraud investigator does... How is Brian supposed to know? Anyway, so I enjoyed the twist in the movie, and while definitely not one of the better movies out there, I thought it was worthwhile watching on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

So this movie was really not too bad... And by that I mean that as I watched it, I kept having to wipe the bile away as it dripped down my chin, while simultaneously pinching myself to make sure that I hadn't died and gone to hell. So wow. Really just mind blown. So we've got this guy, this supposed ex- womanizer (a point that was as un-believable as it was useless... We're talking serious beer gut with a kind of serial killery look) who apparently takes his job as a insurance fraud investigator very seriously, to the point of breaking and entering and lying to old women. Then this guy, this fellah', if you will: he hooks up with Mena Suvari using his culture as a lure. Lucky guy I guess. After his dry and slow relationship had sufficiently bored me to death, this fellah' is tricked by his employers and then drugged, brought to a bridge and finally dropped in the water with some chains on his wrists, and apparently a paperclip or key in his pocket. All this to leave him framed for some murders that they - his employers - had to commit to silence people for asking questions about the massive quantities of bath salts that they were shipping through the town in broad daylight (we're talking van loads). Fast forward one year and we have an equally unattractive, boring and useless character as the investigator, but this one is a writer who is investigating the murders of the town's people. This writer pays $10,000 a month for his condo, and ends up getting pretty deep into the investigation, finding out some pretty dark secrets and all until finally he has to save the girl (Mena Suvari), kill the 5 or 6 thugs, and is finally saved himself by Tom Arnold in a helicopter with a sniper rifle. Then, in an M. Night Shyamalan styled twist we find out that he was dead the whole time! No.... No... That wasn't it... It turned out that the writer guy WAS the investigator from the beginning. But he's spent a year training and getting money from somewhere. Its like the Count of Monte Cristo if it was written by a greeter from Wal Mart, which I think is actually the case after finding out that our lead actor who's name is Average McAverageson, was not only the writer, but also produced the movie himself! Bravo sir. You get one star because IMDb is kind enough to have that be the minimum. My theory: The guy who wrote and acted in this movie really liked Mena Suvari (and I mean, who doesn't. She's absolutely gorgeous), and spent 2.5 million dollars so that he could spend four hours filming a scene with her in a bra.

I was ready to enjoy a bad movie, but honestly It bogs my mind this even got made. Thanks Bierlein & Kawas I especially love the scene where the rich boss is coming out of his office building where the poster of your previous "movie" is on the side of the wall and oh wait the dude is getting into his limo from a theater where he saw your last home project. And gotta lova the stolen scenes from godfather and casino. Did you guys lift those scenes all by yourselves or did someone help you copy them down? It is hilarious indeed. The only thing not funny is money being wasted on this crap. What did you have on Mena Suvari to get her involved? :) Anyway all jokes aside I had to stop after 35 40 minutes as much as I had decided to go with the flow and be a part of the joke to enjoy the movie for how bad it was I just could not bear it. So no spoilers here if you but the dude that got killed with the fake nose and the toupee looked a lot like the writer I was itching to laugh some This may be more fun for a MST3000 type screening with a few drunk friends to watch and joke over.

I never thought I'd be saying this, but Tom Arnold completely out-acts everybody else in this movie. This includes Sadler and Suvari, who are simply outclassed. But I'm willing to accept that all the B-list actors just needed a paycheck, and that Bierlin needed a vanity project. What I can't handle is that, like many of the scripts nowadays, this is just so poorly and incomprehensibly written. Bierlin continuously paints himself into corners and then introduces some ridiculous plot turn or event to get his characters free. Not recommended.