Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6820 in DVD
• Released on: 2008-04-28
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Format: PAL
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 91 minutes

Synopsis
Pierce Brosnan and Maria Bello star in this tense thriller about a couple whose daughter goes missing. Bello plays the grieving mother alongside Gerard Butler. Brosnan appears as a mysterious gunman who tortures his victims through a series of sadistic mind games.

Customer Reviews

Worth a watch
You'll read a lot of half-hearted negativity about this film; it isn't this and it isn't that, it could have been this and it should have been that, 'I guessed the surprise ending too soon', blah-di-blah-di-blah.

I won't go into the inticacies of the plot, there are another hundred plus reviews about that and you can try imdb if you want the film completley ruined.

What I'd like to say is that I expected little of this film and found it to be good, reasonably tense stuff with no weaknesses; not the best film ever but a good afternoon's entertainment.

I'd definitely be happy if I'd rented it and I can recommend that you do.
Yes, I guessed the 'surprise' ending, too but I still enjoyed it.

Easy viewing for an hour and a half
I am unsure initially why this film is a 15, it could possibly have been a 12. I did find it easy viewing but you really do just have to sit back and try not to work it out. I'd clicked with one of the plot twists but not another. Luckily the director seems to have added a little something extra in to stop its complete predictability. The movie really warrants 3.5 stars but not quite 4

Pierce Brosnan just didn't seem at home in this role. I can't identify why though, he just didn't have that hardness required for it, although this might turn out to be indicative of his actual character. I don't want to say too much as with all films of this nature too much can spoil the plot. The two taken hostage just didn't seem to get with the flow, their acting wasn't as if their kidnapped daughter's life depended on it.

What was good is that at the end all the clues etc are revealed so you can see what happened. This was a good idea and I liked this. The characters seemed very typical of what the American Dream is about, except all is not as it seems. Even actually down to the way that Neil and Abby dress etc is stereotypical. Therefore, as viewers, we are forced to analyse the worth of the pursuit of these and instead focus on what is really important in our lives.

I'm pleased I hadn't read any reviews before choosing this film as I might not have bothered, instead I had a bit of light entertainment on a Saturday night that didn't require me to do a lot of thinking. If you aren't enjoying it, the ending does make it all seem clever and worthwhile, even if many aspects are borrowed from other sources (but who doesn't do this these days??)

What would you do to protect your family? Neil and Abby are asked to do whatever the kidnapper requires - would you? He seems to know their every move, but how? Enjoy the film but don't expect any great discussion points.

Surprisingly surprising
There's been more than a few thrillers made in which 'everything is not as it seems', in fact it's pretty much a genre staple; and as a result of this audiences are pretty attuned to what plot twists are likely to be, who will turn out to be acting from an ulterior motive, and what the big ending reveal probably is. So to find that in 'Butterfly on a Wheel' writer William Morrissey has spun a narrative which not only keeps its audience on edge but also throws a series of twists their way which manage to genuinely surprise on a fairly regular basis is in itself a very pleasant surprise.
The movie follows an apparently normal and happy couple played by Gerard Butler and Maria Bello, who find themselves suddenly held up by a mysterious gunman (Peirce Brosnan) in their own car, the gunman has kidnapped their daughter and threatens to have her killed unless they do exactly as he tells them. To go into any further detail about the plot would be to start giving away twists since they start coming pretty much straight away. The writing is pretty tight and though the introduction to Butler's work life is stereotypical in the extreme (just got the big account, heading for promotion, headed for big things, blah blah blah) the rest of the plot stays very unpredictable. The key to this film's effectiveness is that it plays on the assumptions of audiences, it's aware that an audience will attempt to solve the mystery and that they will have seen other films of this nature, and it uses this to play against those assumptions and twist conventions so that something potentially formulaic becomes fresh and interesting again.
There are only really three characters in this film, with the supporting cast little more than extras for much of the film, as such no matter the strength of the scripting it comes down to the performances of the three principle actors and all of them deliver. Maria Bello and Gerard Butler manage to portray complexities to their relationship and subtleties to their characters which lift this otherwise fairly stereotypical movie couple up to a believable and far more compelling pair, they aren't perfect and neither is their marriage but that makes them far more compelling and sympathetic. But the key performance here comes from Brosnan, he gives his character an unnerving menace and brutal energy that are a million miles from the leading man roles he spent so much of his earlier career playing, but its the fact that he also has a terrible sense of woundedness about him that makes this such a stand-out turn from Brosnan, he's a human being instead of a 2D villain, which adds a huge dimension of tragedy to the film since we're watching someone we feel has been pushed to his villainy rather than it being inherent to him.
'Butterfly on a Wheel' is a highly enjoyable, genuinely surprising and oddly fresh thriller which is well worth checking out.