Dear Harvey Keitel,

I have always admired you for not selling out like De Niro and Pacino and acting in some films that are really out there - like Fingers and Order of Death. Unfortunately Blindside was not one of your best choices. The film did have some things going for it like the setting and story. You played a motel manager who spies on the guests. Then you're hired to watch some gangsters and stumble upon a murder plot. The director was aiming for a paranoiac surveillance thriller that was like an over the top 80s version of The Conversation. I liked looking at the nude Lolita Davidovich. She evoked sympathy as a bimbo strip dancer. The plot developments and ending were ridiculous. The 80s score was awful. The film could have used more dialogues or at least silences. Instead, the 80s soundtrack is shoved down our throats. You looked pretty uninterested. But you were quite impressive even when you phoned it in.

Best Regards, Pimpin.

(5/10)

Here is a movie that really does not know what it wants to be. The triple-crossing gangster narrative might conceivably make some kind of sense if you applied yourself to it I guess. But who cares? Whenever Harry Caul, I mean Harvey Keitel, is on screen, the movie is a brooding surveillance procedural with dark overtones of tragedy and loss; when he's not, the movie is an overdrawn melodrama bordering on farce. All the 'clever ideas' - the surveillance tape in the hi-fi store, explaining the corpse at the RIDE checkpoint, the yelling at Santa Claus - make the Keitel stuff seem even more alienated, while simultaneously making the menacing criminals look like utter buffoons. Not that Michael Rudder's lead thug needed any help; his sneering grandstand routine makes you want to avert your eyes and plug your ears. And anyway why does everyone keep conducting their highly sensitive conspiratorial dialogues at top volume in public places like shopping malls and porcelain museums? Rudder and conspirator Alan Fawcett even rent adjacent rooms, but there they go trudging out to the gas station. Everyone was clearly so awestruck at having Keitel on set that they forgot to call upon him to act; he mostly just stands there, except for one scene where he throws an inexplicable hissy fit on Lolita Davidovitch and then they go camp out in a used car for no good reason. The most unforgivable botch yet from Paul Lynch, who was handed a mismatched bunch of parts and crafted them into...a mismatched bunch of parts.

BLINDSIDE is a dull Canadian thriller that boasts a leading role for the typically great Harvey Keitel, who is the only decent thing about it. Keitel plays the proprietor of a sleazy hotel, one of those characters who comes with a great deal of baggage. Some ruthless mobsters ask him to spy on one of the clients, which he does, but he ends up overhearing a planned murder and is forced to act. Unfortunately, this film suffers from a confusing storyline where very little happens and various sides are working against one another. There's the occasional burst of sudden violence but it's mainly dark and dreary, lacking in the suspense needed to make it work.