‘Bane’ Review

Stars: Sophia Dawnay, Lisa Devlin, Tina Barnes, Sylvia Robson, Jonathan Sidgwick | Written and Directed by James Eaves

Maybe it’s the movies I get to review or influences like Saw but right now movies where a group of people are all imprisoned together in an enclosed space and are tested on seems to be the “in thing” at the moment. Bane fits these criteria with just a twist of alien.

For me Bane is a movie of three parts. It starts off with six women trapped in some kind of testing facility, electrified fences surround them and they are unable to escape. They are interrogated and tested in a quite mediocre way and we get to know what little we can find out about them as they all seem to be suffering from amnesia. The second part of the movie they start getting killed off by a surgeon type character with no apparent motive, and then in the third of course we get the conclusion to the story.

Why do I talk about three separate parts? It’s because for me part one was boring, part two became more interesting until part three was treading the water back to boring but saved itself slightly with the ending. The fact that the first part does not really work makes the film seem to drag meaning by the conclusion you really feel that it’s a movie that is just too long. This is quite a shame because the story is not bad and there is an attempt at making this a really good film. The scenes with the Surgeon (as I call him) are interesting and build up tension in all the right ways and you almost look forward to seeing him turn up and do what he does, which of course is murder. The deaths though are not unique, often just being a slash of a knife which is a shame as a little originality can always be a good thing.

One thing that arguably lets Bane down is some of the acting. I prefer the actors to feel more natural and less forced and found in some cases the lines were not hitting the mark for me. This was not the case for all of the characters though as I found the Surgeon to be quite an interesting and dark character who keeps a level of mystery about him. We also don’t find out enough about the aliens and the backstory that could strengthen the story as a whole if it had been looked at in more detail. I can understand why this was not the cause of course as it was used as the reveal for the finale and not something to be relied on for the story as a whole.

Bane is by far not a bad movie and certainly has potential. It has an interesting story but I think it is a shame that the first part really dragged the movies pace. The middle part with the gore and the addition of the Surgeon character is where I really do find it found its pace and is the favourite part for me, it’s just a shame that the pace of the first had dragged. This is one movie that I will re-watch over time to see if additional viewings improve certain areas for me but I do find it flawed but entertaining.
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