Boarding Gate: Critic Reviews

This one is just murk.

Boarding Gate plays with various genre codes and conventions very differently than most run-of-the-mill modern thrillers.

There's basically only one reason to see Olivier Assayas's self-consciously hypermodern, meta-sleazy, English-French-Chinese-language globo-thriller Boarding Gate, and her name is Asia Argento.

A ridiculous poseur thriller that seems to be made up of the slow moments from Hong Kong action films and Euro-flashy stuff like Run Lola Run.

[Director] Assayas is out of his element here, and the encounters have no snap: It's like one of those two-character plays in which the frequent pauses are filled with the audience's coughing spasms.

[Director Assayas] may have something serious to say about the brutal impersonality of global capitalism, yet he's caught somewhere between insight and exploitation.

What it all means is up for grabs, but for connoisseurs of sadomasochistic nastiness, it's a must-see.

If this is the effect Mr. Assayas wanted to achieve, he has succeeded admirably.

Thrills and drama are left standing on the tarmac in Boarding Gate, a limp, sleazy inanity.

Even an ultra-feral performance by Asia Argento -- the art house Angelina Jolie -- isn't enough to suffer through Boarding Gate, a draggy and incoherent thriller by French director Oliver Assayas.

This hypnotic, angular thriller about sex, murder, betrayal and money takes you on a feverish journey from nowhere to somewhere.

Chock full of elements that never spark beyond one-sheet dimension.

The plot may be murky, but actress Asia Argento is a clear and commanding force throughout.

Distills genre tropes (and their consequent pleasures) to their lean, potent essence.

When all the nonsense of Boarding Gate ends, only Asia remains in memory. She can light up the best and the worst of 'em.

As for Argento ... yeah, she's got something. Now we'd like to see her in a movie that makes sense.

The main thing interesting about Boarding Gate is the spectacle of Assayas' effort -- the attitude and the international backdrop -- not the story itself.

In the "B" movie days, a story like this would shoot by in about 70 minutes without time to pick holes in the motives. But Assayas takes a bloated, boring 106 minutes.

Could have been an exciting and inventive film, if only it weren't so bland and familiar.

Like just about everything in Boarding Gate, the finale suggests that its creators have been watching too many other movies with similar premises and payoffs.

[Assayas] has concocted a plot that is dizzying and annoying at times, and it's hard to care about the characters in the shifting story. But B-movie veteran Argento's portrayal of Sandra is like watching a car careening down an incline.

Writer-director Olivier Assayas must have been working out some personal demons to make something as embarrassing as Boarding Gate, the most trite and trivial piece of sleaze since Abel Ferrara's Snake Eyes.

Boring gate.

There are long, droning bouts of dialog about nothing meant to link scenes together, but all Boarding Gate really does is fixate on watching Asia Argento do stuff.