Walled In

I must admit that I thought the premise of this movie sounded interesting. You’ve got a mysterious building wrought with scandal as 15 years earlier 16 bodies had been cemented into the walls and after all these years the building must be torn down. Based on a French novel Les Emmeures it could have been an interesting movie, but alas, it was plain and very little made any use of common sense.

The intro of the movie was a bit of a bait and switch, a little girl wakes up in a cement tomb confused and calling for her father, when faucets at the base of the walls begin to pour out wet cement, filling up the small room and we see the little girl scream as she is lost in the grey matter. It is downhill from this point I’m afraid as it transitions lightning fast to our protagonist’s graduation party. Having just graduated in engineering, Samantha will be joining her father’s company of blowing up buildings and possibly a partner if she completes a job on her own. Oh boy!

Anyway, Sam trundles up to her first assignment. Sitting in the middle of some swampy weed infested field hours away from anything, is a ridiculously large block of cement disguised as an apartment building. At least she gets to blow it up right? Sam enters into a gargantuan lobby straight out of Gotham City. I’m thinking this place is empty, you know, because it is going to be destroyed and everything, you would think that any tenants or squatters would have been sent eviction notices weeks earlier than this. It is not empty however, it still has four of the original occupants living within. The first that Sam meets is this freaky cat faced lady who is the care taker and her son who takes Sam on a tour of the building, the other two don’t really matter.

Sam is given a list of really stupid rules while touring the halls, and she is apparently forbidden from going to the 8th floor which was where the architect, Malestrazza, lived before he was a victim in the murders 15 years earlier. And she can’t go to the roof for no reason at all. The building is being torn down, who cares!

You see all of four minutes of Sam working on establishing the weak points of the building to lay the explosions. She has a laser pointing thing, blue prints and a can of spray paint and either sucks at her job, or was more interested in the mystery of Malestrazza’s building than I was because four minutes of work is all you see her do. I want this job! Anyway, the “mystery” unfolds rather un-mysteriously and is so unspectacular that I wept for the time I had just wasted.

I was however surprised that the actor Mischa Barton who played Samantha did not channel her character from The OC She is not a great actress, but is not as bad as the Duff sisters or the girl in Twilight. The movie was disappointing and the idea that it was a book before this leaves me wondering if the story was just as trite as this cinematic gem. I like the poster though.