A Simple Plan

Bill Paxton, Billy Bob Thornton and Whatshisname find a plane with 4,4 million dollars. They decide to keep it. They shouldn't have. Also starring Bridget Fonda, directed by Sam Raimi.

Since everybody has been talking about this film I guess I should re-watch the damn thing. It's Sam Raimi walking into Coen country. There's the snowy midwest, but also everything going wrong for the main characters. Raimi steps away from his previous style. There are no frenetic camera moves, like in his horror movies or his western, The Quick and The Dead, rather a classic, understated direction. The opening of the film, with Paxton going through the small town and saying hello to everybody also brings back memories of It's A Wonderful Life.

I had read the book the film is based on before seeing it the first time, so that sort of ruined it a bit for me, knowing already what would happen. And there are scenes in the book that I thought were believable, but that I had some trouble with in the film. Like the first death. It was just a bit hard to believe when put into images. There's another killing at the end of the book, maybe the most horrific, that they maybe wisely left out of the film. It's possible that Thornton overdoes it a bit as the idiot brother. It's not a bad film, though. It has an effective dread right from the beginning, and for the sequence with the FBI agent I think even Hitchcock would have nodded with approval.