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jghedge
Reviews
Belle (2013)
Judge's Ruling Strengthened, Not Weakened, Slavery
SPOILER ALERT: ILLOGICAL ENDING
Liked the movie BUT...the ending doesn't make sense. If the judge had ruled against the insurance company, then the insurance companies would simply have stopped insuring the slave ships. Instead, the judge's ruling enabled the continued underwriting of slave ships! Yet the movie pretends that this decision was somehow anti-slavery! Had the judge ruled against the insurance company, it would have effectively shut down the British slave trade! "Yay yay we won! Oh...but this means that slave ships are still insurable...whoops...". Other than that glaring plot flaw - great writing, cinematography and acting from some great actors. Insurance companies don't lose too many cases though, or even get taken to court, simply because if they lose, it has implications far beyond the actual case.
The Secret Pact (1999)
Idiotic Storyline/Plot
The plot hinges upon a college freshman who witnesses his parents being murdered, but since he is wearing swimming goggles at the time, the killers do not get a good look at him, but they know who he is because they were business associates of the parents.
He enters the Witness Protection Program and is concealing his identity by registering with a fake identity at a university in Montreal. His pursuers, one of whom is a classmate, know what college he is attending because they have somehow penetrated the FBI Witness Protection Program, but do not know his fake name or have a picture of his face to put with either the real name or the fake one, so the classmate uses process of elimination to find the son.
But knowing his real name, why not just look through his high school yearbook, where he is on the swim team, to find his picture? Or do a DMV check, which should be no problem for crooks sophisticated enough to penetrate the FBI? And why would he be in Witness Protection before the trial - wouldn't he have to blow his cover to testify? And Polaroid cameras, and student records kept in manila folders in file cabinets instead of computers, in the year 2001?
It would be far more interesting than the film itself was to hear the writers explain how they thought anyone with an IQ higher than 10 could possibly overlook such gigantic holes in the plot. My hunch is that the writers themselves were possessed of no higher acumen than their target audience and were thus incapable of recognizing said holes.