8/10
I don't know what I was expecting.....
6 July 2018
I kept getting the feeling while I was watching According To Ben Adams that if it was made before the days of CGI and franchises that are all the same film that this would have been a film that stood out. When you tell a story with good actors, a good story and very good script and all of that seems old fashioned then you know it must be 2018. But it doesn't look like an old fashioned film though. It's a small film and it's from Australia and it does a good job of not making you feel like you're anywhere in particular. Even time seems to have stood still to follow the sometimes funny and sometimes creepy adventures of a devil character messing with people's minds. All you need to know about the story is that there's a character that calls himself Jesus who has a bit of a racket going at an asylum. He has a following and is sure doing a lot of good until the devil comes along. Now I don't know who it was that said why should the devil get all the good tunes when they were talking about music, well the same usually happens when you stick a devil into a film. Well the devil in According To Ben Adams easily gets all the best lines. Bramwell Noah plays the devil and he's unbelievable. He does evil and dark and handsome in a plot that pits him up against a nemesis that's a Jesus with even more of a heartthrob presence. But the actor playing Jesus (Daniel Schepisi) can act too and he acts his heart out let me tell you. He gets help from a cheeky use of illustrations to literally illustrate the stories he tells and it works wonderfully. The whole package works too with everything coming together and everything thrown in. This film lived up to the hype and I loved every minute of this slice of brave cinema i'm going to call it. Like I said in the title to this review, I don't know what I was expecting. But all of the above is what I got. I think that puts me ahead.
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