A convicted drug dealer has 24 hours before facing 7 years in jail.
I mostly watched this movie because it was on my list, and it was easy for me to find. I didn't actually hear anyone praise it on any of my networks, which is kind of weird. Most of those people praise Edward Norton's performance in American History X, but nobody mentions 25th Hour. I'm not saying people praising AHX are wrong, I mean I haven't seen American History X yet, I'm going to, one day. I'm just saying that Norton's performance in this movie was excruciating.
I haven't read the book the movie is based on, but I think I can get a good idea of the structure of the book. Anyway, the story was very well written. Some of the dialogue had that thing Tarantino does - you know, characters talking about something completely irrelevant to the plot. Then again the characters do talk about important things in a very well written way. It's not completely realistic, but in this movie it doesn't need to be. I think the most important thing about this movie is to realise what the main character Monty feels, and how everyone else feels about what's going to happen to Monty, and how they feel about how Monty feels about it.
If there's anything that really made an impression on me, it was the monologue Monty had in the bathroom. It was of course gruesome, but it was also very awesome, very ingenious, it was very real. If you want to, you can read that monologue here, it's the first one, yeah, the really long one. It's very real in the way that many people would try to find something else to blame for their misery. Even though Monty isn't really blaming everyone, that's kind of what the monologue is like. "Fuck everyone else, fuck everything, because of what's happening to me." Well, Monty knows that's he's in the shit because of himself. But of course he wants a moment where he can say fuck you to the whole world that's sort of let him down now.
Of course the ending, the last monologue, made an impression on me, but I don't know how much I can talk about it without giving anything away. I'll just say that it made me very emotional. If that was not unconditional love, then I don't know what is. And the monologue made everything worse, because you knew what could be, but you knew it wouldn't. I hope that was so vague that no one can blame me for ruining the ending.
It was also amazing to see quite a bit of the other characters as well. Of course we learnt a lot about Monty, and that last night of his was meant to be about him. But others have life besides him, and we can see a glimpse of that. Except for Naturelle, though, seriously, did we learn anything about her besides that she has Puerto Rican heritage and that she loves Monty. That was kind of typical, we had a female character solely to be there for the male character.
For me 25th hour was a very emotional experience. Of course it had it dull moments and bad moments, but still it was almost from the beginning to the very end very well done and very emotive movie.
Btw now I'm 75 % through my list / my challenge, whatever.
☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆
9 / 10
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