Review

by Adam K

South American kidnap thriller/action

Despite the obvious ending being reminiscent of "Casablanca," which is a great film, "Proof of Life" held up for the most part with A LOT of action--guns, muscle, and physical cruelty. Crowe is mostly always good, but Ryan surprised me in this. I found her multi-dimensional, able to shake the cutesy business that she usually plays, and really good as a quite desperate wife who has some issues with her world-hopping engineer husband. Morse was believably chauvinistic early on (before the kidnapping), and quite remarkably believable as a desperate hostage. Crowe was solidly heroic, not a Humphrey Bogart, to be sure, but certainly someone whom Ryan as Alice would remember for a long time. Certainly Terry and Alice never had "Paris" to remember, but there were good vibrations between them as Crowe plotted to save her husband.