This movie is primarily pathos with little if any logos

delgados129

If you don't mind having your emotions toyed with, then you won't mind this movie. On the other hand, if you enjoy British crime mysteries, following clues and seeing how they all logically fall into place at the end, you'll be very disappointed.

Here are some of the logical inconsistencies that lead to that disappointment:

* While the police utilize the CCTV cameras early on to gather clues about the mystery, the huge truck that stopped and blocked the children's view just before her disappearance doesn't get caught on camera. This is a critical piece of the mystery. It's inconsistent to have the car the children were in caught on camera and not the big truck that is so critical to the mystery.

* The movie goes to great lengths to show the sophistication of the equipment in tracking down the children's movements but misses the opportunity to utilize the same sophisticated equipment is tracking down vehicles that may have entered the crime scene from camera-visible locations adjacent to the crime scene as part of developing clues.

* In England, driving is on the left. The director goes out of his way to have the car at the crime scene park on the right, several meters away from the flower kiosk, when it could have easily parked immediately behind, or even on the side; as the huge truck did.

* The police forensics team is so meticulous as to find a discarded cell phone in a sewer drain several miles from the scene of the crime, but can't find any blood evidence from the head injury right at the crime scene, even though they secured the scene just hours after the disappearance and with no intervening rainfall.

* Search dogs were not used at all to find the missing children; this from the country that is well known for developing the hound dog for search and hunting.

* It is illogical that such a highly publicized news story would not turn up the presumably innocent truck driver that stopped at the flower kiosk.

* It is illogical that the mother would go to such extremes and expend so much effort to leave carpet fiber clues under her fingernails for her eventual murder investigators –even coaxing her daughter to do the same-- while she simply could not have crawled out of the unguarded mobile home. If she had enough sense about her to ask her daughter to get carpet fibers under her nails, she could of just as easily asked her daughter to call out for help or even leave the mobile home that was in a crowded residential park.

* The suspect that abducted the little girl was portrayed as mentally slow/dimwitted --justifying his unknowingly drowning of the mother— but, he was smart enough not to cooperate with the police and also fully exercise his rights not to self-incriminate.

There are more inconsistencies like this that will lead to a true sleuth aficionado's disappointment. 'Five Days' is a very weak British crime story.

score 2/10

delgados129 11 July 2009

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2094212/