EXAM (2009)

Exam is a perfect example of the vast distance, a chasm in fact, between a good idea and a good film. It's proof of how a good writer, a good director and a good cast are all vital to turning a brainwave into a memorable piece of cinema.

Simon Garrity (writer) and Stuart Hazledine (directing and writing credits) must have thought they had come up with a nugget of gold, the idea of 8 strangers applying for the same role in a mysterious company, locked in a room taking an exam at the same time. When it comes to the start, they turn their papers over only to be greeted with a completely blank sheet.....The rules don't prohibit the candidates from talking so they begin to co-operate to try and understand the problem that they must solve. It's kind of like The Apprentice meets the first Saw film, with a sprinkling of an automatic lock-in game from the Crystal Maze.



I had heard interesting things and I must admit as the beginning unwound I was intrigued. How could you not be? The trouble is, the suspense lasts about as long as I would do in front of Alan Sugar. The fault of this lies in the first instance with the acting. With the exception of Jimi Mistry (who we know from East is East, 2012 and Rocknrolla), the cast is made up of TV actors and those who have had tiny parts in not very good films. That isn't to say that they aren't going to be talented, they may not have had their big break, but none of them have enough in their locker (including Mistry) to make the opening stages of the film interesting, scenes that rely on the characters not doing much, just talking and gradually coming under psychological pressures. Wooden acting isn't good enough when the people on screen are holding papers up to different types of light. Firth and Franco would probably struggle to keep that interesting.

The acting doesn't pick up either, but then that doesn't really matter as Garrity and Hazledine try to go up a couple of gears and make things interesting. It's as you would expect, factions emerge, tempers fray. Then the plot gets daft. Bits of info about the organisation start to come out and it begins to veer towards  silly science fiction, and not in a good way.

It's not a long film, so I wasn't really bored, as I was keen to know what the mystery was, what clever twists did the movie have in store? I was also telling myself (as my girlfriend yawned and fidgeted next to me, not hiding her boredom from me one little bit) that films like this often hinge on their ending, so I was holding hope of an emphatic denouement.

I should have known better. It was messy, anti-climatic, stupid (despite thinking it's clever) and, somehow, pretentious. I felt wholly unsatisfied by the whole thing, just like this year's Apprentice final in fact. Come to think of it, I have no doubt that Stuart Baggs would reign victorious if he was one of the candidates in this film.

So, next time you're day dreaming at work and you think you've come up with a good idea for a movie, stop, think long and hard, because, judging by this film, it needs to be a lot more than that.