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OK, for starters, this movie should have been about 45 minutes shorter. The end of the movie really occurred just when the file became unnecessary, and lots of the temper- tantrum scenes throughout were completely unnecessary. These two stupid fucks are children; we get that.
Next, why in the hell wouldn't Gipson (not Gibson, it was spelled several times for us throughout the movie) take the damned blank check. Pompous, self-righteous asshole got what he deserved, in my opinion. I mean, he wasn't getting custody with no therapy, a short stint in AA, and no stable home. He should have left calmly and filed an appeal six months later. Legal separation before a divorce is final is six months anyway, so nothing was written in stone.
Third, what's so hard about handing over your insurance card and letting the bureaucrats sort it out? You're in a car wreck, you're screwed anyway. Avoid the headache and let the insurace company worry about it. That's what insurace is for. Besides, the accident was clearly Gipson's fault. Why's he pissed off at Banek?
The movie plot was excruciatingly slow because of the unnecessary scenes, and to make things worse, the director decided that a suspense/thriller score and quick, clever cinematography would lend it the interest that it otherwise would lack. Alas! It wasn't so. The quick-changing camera angles, the grainy images, and the low-lighting (even at noon, I might point out...I never had any clue what time of day it was supposed to be) served only to irritate me because I was conflicted between what the signals "told" me to feel, and my brain telling me that there wasn't a realistic, let alone honorable or even well-rounded character, in the whole damn thing. In the end we are preached to and told that there are no decent people, that everyone screws everyone else and all that matters is that the general public never realizes what the pecking order is, and everyone will live happily ever after.
This movie should NOT have had a happy ending! Wanna drive home the point about how shitty it is when people screw one another over, make everyone miserble at the end. Banek's wife leaves him for the fresh-faced, dorky new lawyer. Gipson's wife goes to Oregon and ends up a fat waitress at a truck stop with an abusive boyfriend. Gipson hangs himself in his shitty new house. Banek's boss/father-in- law goes to jail for fraud, because his poorly hidden paper trail is uncovered by the snappy young lawyer (who actually READS his cases), who becomes a partner at another sleazy firm and turns into a roach like everyone else. And all avoidable if these two guys had been decent to one another in the first place.
There's a good movie.
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