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Review: ‘Incendiary’ — Utterly Unconvincing Terrorism Drama is Exploitative Nonsense
An okay cast struggles through a troubling, laughably poor melodrama by Sharon Maguire
Incendiary is, easily, the worst film I have seen in a long time. Considering its cast, which includes Ewan McGregor, Michelle Williams and Matthew Macfadyen, it’s easy to have at least a mild expectation of quality from this film especially considering its premise. Incendiary, written and directed by Sharon Maguire (director of Bridget Jones’s Diary and Bridget Jones’s Baby) based upon Chris Cleave’s 2005 book of the same name (eerily, a novel about terrorism in London released on the 7th of July 2005…), follows the experience of grief and loss from a young mother’s perspective after she loses her husband and son in a terrorist attack during a football match.
From its beginning, Incendiary is a film with massive problems. Its opening, a gathering of brief introduction scenes to establish the unnamed mother’s relationship with her unnamed son, is accompanied by narration so terribly cliched that it feels as though it were written by a child. To establish that it is a British film, if the settings and the accents and every other part of the mise-en-scene didn’t make that fact obvious, Maguire ensures that she packs in every single…
