A film by Tom Twyker

I can no longer remember why I had originally wanted to see this movie, only that it ended up on my to watch list for an extended period of time. I finally got a chance to rent this and I was surprised and pleased to see that it is directed by Tom Twyker (Run Lola Run). The fact that it stars Cate Blanchett is another plus. The dialogue in this film is almost entirely spoken in Italian with a small amount of English spread throughout the movie.

At the beginning of the movie, Philippa (Cate Blanchett) plants a bomb in a man s office. She makes sure that the other office workers are not in the area and then calls the police, telling them what she did and saying that they did not listen to her phone calls and her letters, and this is the result. Unfortunately, as she is making the phone call, a member of the cleaning staff empties the wastebasket with the bomb and it subsequently explodes, killing four people, none of them the target. Philippa is arrested and she breaks down when she learns that four innocents were killed.

Philippa tries to explain her intent and why she was trying to kill that particular man. The Italian police do not believe her, and the proof she offers up disappears in the investigation. A young police officer, Filippo (Giovanni Ribisi) takes pity on her and falls in love with Philippa. Yes, it is that quick. He decides to help her escape, and then help her continue on with her mission to kill the man who she feels needs killing.

As far as the story making sense and being believable, Heaven does not succeed in this way. What Heaven does do a good job of is making me care about Philippa and what happens to her. While the plot didn t make too much sense, the movie still drew me in and I thoroughly enjoyed the movie. It has a much slower pace than Twyker s Run Lola Run , but like Run Lola Run I enjoyed every minute of the movie even those minutes that seemed out of place. This is not a great movie, but it is a pretty good one. Somehow, the movie is better than the sum of its parts, but if you try to think back and break up the whole back into parts, you can t quite figure out exactly what it is that you liked about the movie. For me, that s Heaven .

3 1/2 out of 5 pugs