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Review – The Factory

seasoned_geek by seasoned_geek

★★★★★

the factory cover

I must confess up front that I seem to always like John Cusack in a movie. I was kind of shocked to stroll by the under $5 discount bin and see this movie on top of the pile. Odd that I had never heard of it. Naturally it went into the cart. Yes an actual shopping cart as I was in an actual store.

Mr. Cusack is one of those gifted actors. Even in a bad movie he can shine. I’m not just saying that because he is a fellow Illinoisan, I really mean it. Thankfully you don’t have to worry about that because this movie is fantastic!

Unless it went straight to DVD, I am befuddled as to how I did not hear about this movie. It is sooooo good. Mr. Cusack plays an obsessed cop on the trail of a serial killer, then his teenage daughter disappears and he drops the professional cop part of his personality.

It is difficult to review this movie without giving too much away. I did not have a clue it was going to end the way it ended. That was an upper cut which caught me standing flat footed.

The serial killer targets hookers. He doesn’t have a pattern to his timing or type of girl, other than hooker. The teenage daughter of the cop was dressed like a hooker and out late (to get cigarettes if I remember correctly) and our serial killer nabs her.

Part of me finds it difficult to call this character a “serial killer.” In my mind that is a label applied to someone whose primary intent is to kill, usually after some torture and/or sexual violation. Not the M.O. of this individual. He only kills the women who don’t give him a baby. Yes, this dude is out there. The full story line is even farther out there, yet it all seems real. The actors and director do an incredible job of pulling the audience into the world that is this film.

Jennifer Carpenter does a phenom job with her role. Kind of background, kind of foreground, always there without walking on anything. Yes, that description will sound weird, but, after you watch the movie you will understand. She really should have gotten at least one award nomination for her work in this movie. It’s a difficult task to stay out of the way when you spend so much time front and center, but she did it admirably. I don’t think casting could have found a more compatible pair of actors, on screen anyway. No idea how they are together in real life.

Definitely worth adding to your rental list or rescuing from the $5 or less bin.

Roland Hughes started his IT career in the early 1980s. He quickly became a consultant and president of Logikal Solutions, a software consulting firm specializing in OpenVMS application and C++/Qt touchscreen/embedded Linux development. Early in his career he became involved in what is now called cross platform development. Given the dearth of useful books on the subject he ventured into the world of professional author in 1995 writing the first of the "Zinc It!" book series for John Gordon Burke Publisher, Inc.

A decade later he released a massive (nearly 800 pages) tome "The Minimum You Need to Know to Be an OpenVMS Application Developer" which tried to encapsulate the essential skills gained over what was nearly a 20 year career at that point. From there "The Minimum You Need to Know" book series was born.

Three years later he wrote his first novel "Infinite Exposure" which got much notice from people involved in the banking and financial security worlds. Some of the attacks predicted in that book have since come to pass. While it was not originally intended to be a trilogy, it became the first book of "The Earth That Was" trilogy:
Infinite Exposure
Lesedi - The Greatest Lie Ever Told
John Smith - Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars

When he is not consulting Roland Hughes posts about technology and sometimes politics on his blog. He also has regularly scheduled Sunday posts appearing on the Interesting Authors blog.