44 - P2

    On Christmas Eve, a woman is trapped in her office building, held captive by a crazed security guard.
    I’m always impressed when a movie is able to keep a lack of locations interesting.  The lack of a budget usually means that the script had to have something compelling about it - a message, a clever story, something.  At the very least, it means that there’s a skilled director that feels they can do something with a weak story or script.  Somehow, despite working with mostly one location, this movie actually had too much budget.  We get a flipped car, we get some gore, and we get a few sequences that just showcase a budget, but the story never rises to the occasion.
    It’s a pretty straightforward captive female story.  The villain is prone to fits of rage, but manages to come off normal to other people.  There are a few other people scattered into the story to provide a bit of a body count (they kind of cheat with this, only showing one death, and just showing a dead body for the other.)
    There are two things that make this movie notable, and they both come close to the end, and neither is a real positive trait.  First, the heroine kills a dog.  It’s true that the movie portrays the dog as menacing and dangerous.  I don’t mind the dog as a threat, but I guess I would just like another way of dealing with the dog.  This ties into the other problem…
    The heroine kills the villain.  This isn’t a problem in itself, but the way it’s handled, it is.
    The heroine has incapacitated and handcuffed the villain to a car.  She chooses to light the guy - and the car - on fire.  She was no longer in danger, and she decides to kill him anyway.  This makes her slip out of a sympathetic character and into a jerk.
    After the heroine is captured, she is changed into a dress.  I don’t mind the idea of the villain re-dressing her.  But somehow, the dress doesn’t seem like his idea.  It seems like an idea that the producers had to add a touch of sex appeal to the movie.  Her dress accents her bust incredibly well, and the direction frames the shots so that they’re regularly on display.
    There’s also a very annoying set piece, where she hides in an elevator.  The villain drops a firehose onto the ceiling and turns it on.  This leads to water dripping in, and eventually filling the bottom of the elevator.  I have serious doubts about this.  Then the villain drops the dead body of another person onto the elevator, breaking the ceiling.  Also unlikely.  What makes this sequence even more annoying is that it doesn’t seem to serve any purpose, only to pad time.  No character development.  No real tension.  It calls attention to how silly the premise is.