Boobirt Stylish but barely mediocre overall

Cortechba Overrated

Huievest Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

HottWwjdIam There is just so much movie here. For some it may be too much. But in the same secretly sarcastic way most telemarketers say the phrase, the title of this one is particularly apt.

jeff-2051 People writing negative reviews of this film are ignorant to their own detriment. No one having suffered blunt force trauma to the soul should write an opinion on a film about blunt force trauma to the soul.My child was shot in the face by a gun. I witnessed the aftermath of the carnage. My brain couldn't even begin to process what I had seen. Jake Gyllenhaal portrays the effects of such trauma as well as I've seen.If you write something negative, nothing truly negative has EVER occurred in your life.

RMS1949 As others have mentioned, we all deal with grief in our own way. But I thought Jake's character was intelligent enough that he should at least admitted to himself and others he was not being normal in his reaction to the sudden death of someone he was supposedly sharing the rest of his life with. The writer portrayed him as this incredibly self centered human being and then his suddenly becoming this very caring person to a troubled teen. It felt like it was just thrown in to make us feel he wasn't a total low life. Somehow To make us all forget everything we sensed prior .. Made little sense. Then his final suggestion is suppose to make us feel all fuzzy inside for him ??. That bordered on the ridiculous. Actors were all great, just an very immature script.

ejonconrad People deal with grief in many ways, but it's hard to believe it would turn someone into a self-centered, unhinged lunatic. And if he did fall that far, it's unlikely that he would snap right back after few convenient plot turns. To Jake Gyllenhaal's credit, he *almost* makes it believable.He plays an investment banker whose wife is killed in a car accident in the first few minutes of the movie. This causes him to question the priorities in his life, alienate everyone around him, and begin to develop a fascination with taking things apart - or just straight up breaking them (ouch! someone just hit me in the head with a blunt metaphor).Through a genuinely original plot device, he starts a relationship with Naomi Watts. She's got her own baggage. Among other things, she has a very troubled teen son, whom she largely ignores, so he has plenty of time to spend with the clearly unstable man she has just welcomed into their lives. Again, Watts is a good enough actress that you kind of forget the fact her character isn't going to win mother of the year.The plot develops through a series of turns and revelations that are all just a bit to neat and contrived. It's not formulaic by any means, but there's never any doubt where it's headed.Chris Cooper turns in his usual great performance as the father of Gyllenhaal's dead wife. He also has the advantage of playing the only character who's behavior seems reasonable.All in all, the movie had a interesting and original premise, but the writer was just a little to impressed with himself.

jimbo-53-186511 Davis Mitchell (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a successful investment banker working for his father-in-law's firm. Tragedy strikes for Davis when his wife Julia (Heather Lind) is killed in a car accident. Shortly after his wife is pronounced dead, Davis has a problem with a vending machine and writes several letters of complaint to the vending machine company, which leads to Davis striking up a friendship with Karen (Naomi Watts) a customer service representative at the vending machine company who is touched by the content of his letters. Davis, with the help of Karen, goes on a voyage of self-discovery after the death of his wife, but the unconventional methods he employs to deal with his wife's death don't meet with approval for those closest to him.Presumably, Demolition is intended as a character study and I can see that an interesting film could have been made out of the character of Davis - he's seemingly an emotionally-retarded man incapable of showing emotion or grief in the conventional sense of the word. In the opening segments of the film, his wife criticises him for not really paying attention, but later in the film we can see that he is actually observant and fairly regimental when going about his daily routine. To me though, it seemed that he only focuses his attention on what is important to him and isn't really interested in what is important to anyone else. The film suggests (as far as I could gather) that there may have been psychological issues with Davis - him being unable to emote or show concern over his wife's death and I really wish that these psychological issues would have had more bearing on the story.Davis' unconventional method of dealing with his wife's death is interesting in its early stages; his desire to open everything up and see how it works may have been a metaphor about his own existence - essentially stripping everything away about himself and rebuilding himself possibly as a better person. As things progress, Davis gets worse and worse and the moment he pays a group of builders to help them knock a house down is the point where we start to learn that Davis is deeply troubled. This aspect of the story is quite interesting and fun to watch (for a while), but once we get to this point there isn't really any further development of Gyllenhaal's character and at this point in the film it goes from being fun and interesting to being tiresome and repetitive.As well as Davis' own life struggle the film has other threads such as Karen's marital problems and her son Chris and his struggle with his sexuality. These themes are littered throughout the film and are covered in dribs and drabs, but never really to an extent that you're able to become emotionally invested in these themes or in the characters. Admittedly, the former thread isn't that interesting, but the latter theme is and perhaps could have been expanded further. I think this is part of the problem with this film in that it has lots of ideas and themes, but at 98 minutes long it perhaps doesn't have the running time to develop all of its ideas and as a result it comes across as being a bit muddled and cluttered at times.Still the acting is pretty good and it is interesting in its early stages and despite some of its problems it never falls into the realms of being unwatchable, but at the same time it's never as interesting as it could have been and when the film ended I felt as though I knew as much about Davis at the end as I did at the start. In my book, Demolition is something of a failure, but it is, at least at times, a moderately interesting failure.