Prime Suspect 3
|
List Price: Our Price: $5.99 You Save: $23.99 (80%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $4.25 (click here) Category: DVD See more DVD releases |
|---|
Buy this DVD movie at online store in your country
Canada
Canada
Movie Reviews of Prime Suspect 3
Movie Review: Still Prime!
Summary: 5 Stars
Get ready to enjoy another installment of the enthralling police crime drama that highlights the talent of Helen Mirren. This deeply disturbing tale of homeless boy prostitutes brings out the dark side of police investigation--at all ranks!Movie Review: Prime Suspect 1
Summary: 5 Stars
Beautiful performances by all involved and thrilling to watch. Involves the viewer from the start, great murder mystery. Helen Mirren is excellent!Movie Review: The only one to buy after the first.
Summary: 4 Stars
The only Prime Suspect installment (other than the original) to be authored by Lynda La Plante, Prime Suspect 3 once again displays the hallmarks of La Plante's journalistic research base for creating fictional characters. In this case, "rent boys" are the fuel: young male prostitutes/street kids, and in particular one heartbreaking interview where a rent boy had told La Plante that he couldn't have AIDS, because he was only 15. Tennison finds herself investigating the burned body of a murdered rent boy found in a drag queen's flat, and begins to discover criminal ties from a community center that lead up into the highest ranks of the police, and she doesn't know whom to trust. Also, her old nemesis from PS1, Bill Otley, is part of her new team. With the amazing Helen Mirren, and an extraordinary support cast including Tom Bell, Ciaran Hinds, David Thewlis, and Peter Capaldi, this is, after the original, the strongest installment in the series.
Movie Review: Difficult subject
Summary: 3 Stars
This deals with the uncomfortable subject of pedophilia. The mystery is uncovered slowly, which is good, but the uncovering of the mystery happens in fits and starts, which I felt inferior to the steady pace (with a final surprise discovery) a good mystery should have. We know long before the end whodunit, but have to spend a third of the movie undoing the coverup. Thus the last third becomes a different kind of movie - more like a legal case. While that isn't bad, I think the change from requires a shifting of the viewer's expectations while following the plot.
I also felt that the authorities-are-hiding-the-truth aspect was depicted as indecisive, which detracted from suspense, a needed attribute.
Having said all that, the acting was well done - a standard for the series. The internal departmental wrangling and backstabbing were true-to-life, thoroughly believable, and the best parts of the episode. And the ending was credible.
Movie Review: Dealing in stereotypes
Summary: 2 Stars
In several of the entries in the "Prime Suspect" series Helen Mirren, as Detective Chief Inspector (later Superintendant) Jane Tennison and the writing have richly deserved all the accolades that have been heaped upon them over nearly twenty years, but that unfortunately is not the case here. This is the only entry besides the first that was written by the series creator Lynda LaPlante, but the writing is extremely weak. This time, Tennison is trying to uncover the truth about a gay pedophilic ring that involves murder, molestation, and child pornography, and all the gay characters Tennison interviews are either delicate victims or monstrous predators (or both). Everything seems lurid and sensationalistic. The director, David Drury, made the ghastly choice to have a boy's choir pipe in incessantly every time Tennison's detectives come across one of the young street hustlers, as if we might forget that innocence has been corrupted. We are also treated to such cliches as fluttery drag queens and menacing AIDS-infected children who inflict deadly bites on the detectives; and it's no good excusing all this by chalking it up to the attitudes of the times, because by 1994 LaPlante truly should have known better. The stereotyping of gay characters is so excessive that in the first episode I knew that there'd have to be at least one suicide attempt among the gay characters: there are no less than three of these, and since two of them seem wildly telegraphed ahead of time in Tennison's immediate proximity she seems like a terrible detective. And she doesn't seem much better as a boss, either, this time around. Usually Tennison must contend with both superiors and subordinates constantly undermining her authority because of her gender, but though her superiors are genuinely out to get her again, here Tennison's underlings seem to be doing the best they can, even though they're constantly being barked at by her for everything imaginable. If you hadn't seen the previous entrants in the series, you'd just think she were just an unpleasant crank.
Mirren, normally an unimpeachable actress, seems to have been done no favors by Drury who allows her to engage in all kinds of distracting bits of "business," like chomping away at her nicotine gum like a house afire to show her distraction and anxiety. David Thewlis, who is also equally talented, also gives a performance that is all tics as the nasty street hustler who is Tennison's prime suspect in the murder of an underage rent boy, and purses his lips over and over again when being interviewed by Tennison and her staff. It's impossible to believe that either he or Ciaran Hinds (here, flat and dull) could deliver any of the menace or charisma needed to keep so many young victims in line. The other actors fare much better, particularly James Frain as a sweet-sad molestation victim and Peter Capaldi as a nervous drag queen. They, and the machinery of the plot, are really all that keeps this production afloat.
More Movie Reviews:
1 2
1 2