6.3 | / 10 |
Users | 3.0 | |
Reviewer | 2.5 | |
Overall | 3.0 |
Advertising executive Charles Schine is just another Chicago commuter who regularly catches the 8:43 A.M. train to work. But the one day he misses his train and meets Lucinda Harris, his life is changed forever. Lucinda is charming, beautiful and seductive. Despite the fact that each are married with children, their attraction to one another is magnetic. Lunch dates quickly become cocktails after work, and before long, Charles and Lucinda's infatuation leads them to a hotel room. Their seemingly perfect affair goes terribly awry when LaRoche, a brutal stranger, breaks into their room and holds them at gunpoint. This once illicit liaison turns into a nightmare more dangerous and violent than either could have ever imagined. Charles' life soon becomes filled with deception, blackmail, violence and crime. Unable to confide in his wife or speak to the police, Charles finds himself trapped in a world he doesn't recognize, with no trace of the life he once knew.
Starring: Clive Owen, Jennifer Aniston, Vincent Cassel, Xzibit, RZAThriller | Insignificant |
Drama | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.34:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
French: Dolby Digital 5.1 (640 kbps)
English, Spanish
25GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region free
Movie | 2.5 | |
Video | 2.5 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 2.0 | |
Overall | 2.5 |
Is Jennifer Aniston cursed? Sure, sure, sure, she’s fabulously wealthy, incredibly beautiful and managed to be the “Debbie Reynolds” to Brad’s “Eddie Fisher” and Angelina’s “Elizabeth Taylor.” But while the post-Friends career and even personal universe hasn’t been exactly rosy for any of that hit sitcom’s stars, the bad luck seems to have hit Aniston particularly hard. Back when Aniston was a Top 10 television phenomenon, Jolie was merely that weird girl who carried a vial of Billy Bob’s blood around and who kissed her brother at the Oscars. Aniston even courted a bit of Oscar buzz herself with her turn in The Good Girl, and her first forays into film seemed to promise the sort of big screen success that regularly eludes ostensible superstars of the airwaves. But around the time her marriage to Pitt crumbled, Aniston ceased to be a surefire draw at the box office, and in fact she’s delivered one dud after another in the last few years. Even Aniston’s putative hits—films like Marley and Me and He’s Just Not That Into You—perhaps owed their success less to Aniston’s appeal than to built in audiences due to their prefabricated draws based on their source material. Jolie is of course now probably the biggest female name in American films, while perky little girl next door Aniston is probably wondering what she must have done to deserve all this relative misfortune. Sandwiched in between two of Aniston’s signature light comedy roles in Along Came Polly and Rumor Has It. . . came 2005’s Derailed, a sort of Brief Encounter meets Diabolique romantic thriller that posits Aniston as a woman caught up in an affair that has disastrous consequences. Of course as in any good thriller, nothing is really as it seems, but that’s part and parcel of Derailed’s problem. Anyone with half a brain (and that might be half a brain more than screenwriter Stuart Beattie, adapting James Siegel’s novel) is probably going to guess the eventual denouement of Derailed, or at the very least, one of the denouements, as this is a thriller that “keeps on giving”—endings, that is.
Derailed unfortunately suffers from one of the poorer Blu-ray transfers I've seen recently. Delivered via an AVC codec, in 1080p and a 2.34:1 aspect ratio, Derailed is hobbled by omnipresent digital noise that litters the frame like a horde of pesky gnats flying indiscriminately around. Add to this some fairly overwhelming grain and you have the makings of even ardent DNR-phobes begging for a little noise reduction. Colors are quite good, with excellent saturation and a nicely varied palette, and in brightly lit scenes, where noise and grain tend to be diminished to relatively bearable levels, a good degree of fine detail and sharpness emerge in the image. But overall this is a fairly shoddy looking Blu-ray that is certainly not going to set any fan's heart a-flutter with its hi-def clarity.
Derailed's lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix is a good deal better than its image quality, but that may be the backhanded compliment of the waning year. When the film erupts in gunfire or fisted violence, there's some great LFE and good immersion. But the bulk of this film is dialogue driven and as such there's simply not that much opportunity to exploit the surrounds. The sides and rears come into play in expected places, like crowded office scenes, a restaurant and a couple of very explosive action sequences. Otherwise things are anchored pretty steadily in the front channels, where everything is clear as a bell and easy to hear. Nothing extremely remarkable here, but certainly nothing major to complain about, either.
Derailed doesn't offer a whole lot in the supplements department:
Derailed is its own worst enemy, and not just in its too apt title. There's too much here that has been done better elsewhere, and not even the charisma of Owen and Aniston can help overcome the déjà vu. With one of the poorer Blu-ray transfers in recent memory, this is one train you should let pass you by.
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