You won't be disappointed!

A lot more amusing than I thought it would be.

In truth, any opportunity to see the film on the big screen is welcome.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

This was a terrible, terrible movie! Oh my god, I can't even get the words out. It's freaking' dramatic. As in 'dramatically bad', not as in 'this is a dramatic movie'. Oh my word.I did not have one moment where I empathized or sympathized with any of the characters other than the older dude doing the dishes whose name I don't even remember. This movie tries to portray Halam as if he's freaking' endearing (or understandable) when he's busy spying on people, with those typical background tunes and everything, and he's not. He's a creep, he's creepy, he peeks into windows when people are unsuspectingly doing their own things. And the ending just confirmed my feelings. I wish it wasn't so, all the while I was wishing I would stop seeing him as a creep but I didn't. Terrible movie. Voyeurism is not endearing, no matter how troubled you are.

Maybe I just wasn't intelligent enough to get this movie, but to me, Mister Foe was just weird and twisted. Jamie Bell (who I'll always associate with Billy Elliott) was phenomenal as Hallam Foe, a seventeen year old voyeur, whose mother had recently committed suicide. Unable to cope, Hallam leaves for the big city, where he finds a woman who looks eerily similar to his mother and Hallam starts spying on her. I get that this film was supposed to be coming of age, sophisticated, and meaningful, but honestly, I just found it creepy. The film was choppy, extremely slow, and just when you thought something was going to happen, it doesn't. In Mister Foe, Jamie Bell really does show just how good an actor he has become. Aside from that, this movie is just weird.

HALLAM FOE is a good name for a story about being the enemy of your own peace. I wish the movie were as good. In the pantheon of coming of age fairy tales, there is no more common theme than the Oedipal; it's easy, and easy to screw up. David Mackenzie doesn't completely screw this one up until the end, but he does take a lot of convenient outs along the way, some handed him by Peter Jinks and others invented with Ed Whitmore. Start with a boy whose dead mother obsession turns his anger on, yes, a wicked stepmother, whom he sleeps with at the first opportunity, which is I suppose one way to revenge himself. But the deed only sends him careening off to find a better mother figure, this time a dead ringer - which brings us to another really easy choice: Mom's doppelganger is an HR chief who immediately and not very credibly hires him so that he can have less trouble stalking her. When she finds out that he spends most of his time glued to her windows with binoculars, she's more willing than most victimized girls to give him second and third chances to explain himself. So Oedipus gets to sleep with two surrogate mothers, but in attacking his surrogate and real fathers, he inflicts only minor wounds that are not very satisfying to him nor to me. The whole movie is like that. There are many missed opportunities (like a real consequence for anybody's actions), red herrings (like a maybe suspicious/maybe not pair of third act crutches) and dead ends (whatever happened to his voyeurism? and where did it come from, for that matter?).Oh well. As David Mackenzie movies go, at least it's no YOUNG ADAM. It is enormously less repellent and makes slightly more sense than that, and there are compensations: Claire Forlani, looking more severe than usual, and Sophia Myles, bringing some reality to a ridiculous role, and Ciaran Hinds and Ewen Bremner and Maurice Roeves, who are never less than perfect. Plus a resourceful and occasionally charming Oedipus, well played by the increasingly interesting Jaime Bell. And within its limitations the movie is intermittently, almost consistently engaging and enjoyable... until it winds up down by the loch, in a graceless calm-after-the-sturm und drang revelation that patly solves everyone's problems except mine.

Mister Foe is another "indie coming of age dramedy" with a hip indie soundtrack about a charismatic teen with psychological problems. Hallam is a film about a boy who misses his dead mother and ends up striking up a relationship with a women who looks like her. Normally films handle the Oedipus complex a little tactfully but Mister Foe goes right for it and pulls no punches. Even after they set it up they go to the well once too often. Each character has a broadly drawn idea of their personality but we never get a sense of who they are. The fact that both of them have such emotional baggage is what is supposed to make it interesting, but they have that baggage because the film says they do. The baggage exists to create the characters and not that characters exist because of the baggage. At the end the character development seems to serve the plot more the the characters themselves. The best parts of this film is the voyeurism angle and even that seems to get lost in the shuffle and even downplayed to other aspects like a weak and unnecessary family drama in addition to a murder mystery that it seems even David Mackenzie tries to downplay and holds off as long as he can. Jamie Bell does give a great performance as Hallam playing a somber yet energetic teenager even if he doesn't have much to work with. David Mackenzie also does a great job of framing the film with some beautiful backdrops and backgrounds. It seems his weakest aspect is filming characters as his character moments are flat and uninteresting with the backgrounds being what gives it flare. Mister Foe is a character study of caricatures. It is fun and odd but at the same time shallow.