Russia Region-free blu-ray
1080p Widescreen 1.85:1
Russian: LPCM 5.1
Subtitles: English
MOVIE: 7.5
VIDEO QUALITY: 8
AUDIO QUALITY: 9
ENGLISH SUBTITLES: 10
EXTRAS: 6
Kray (aka The Edge) was Russia’s submission to the Best Foreign Film category for the 2010 Oscars. It’s a decent film, but it’s a “good film see-once” kind of film, not worthy of any major awards except for Best Train scenes at the Trains-In-Movies 2010 Awards which will be seriously competing against Tony Scott’s Unstoppable. The acting is very good, but the story doesn’t really kick in until the 30-minute mark when the German girl shows up. And when that story kicks in, it’s not as developed as it could have been.
Chinese action movies may have a kung fu scene once every 10 minutes.
Italian movies have characters screaming at each other once every 10 minutes.
French movies have characters sitting around the house in the city or country talking about philosophy and relationships once every 10 minutes.
Dutch or Danish movies may have a sex scene once every 10 minutes.
Indian movies have characters breaking out into song-and-dance once every 10 minutes.
And what I love about Russian movies is that they make sure to have a “drinking alcohol” scene once every 10 minutes. Those Russians love filming drinking!
For a train movie and by the looks of the flashy blu-ray cover, I was expecting a pretty intense ride, but instead this movie movies along at a leisurely pace. There are some pretty exciting scenes in this film, such as the main character and German girl working together to fix a broken bridge and then crossing that bridge, an all-nude female cat fight, and a couple train racing scenes.
The Russian blu-ray is labled as Region A, B, and C. The blu-ray video quality ranges from fair to excellent. The dark, dimly-lit scenes have DVD quality (3 out of 5), while the bright day scenes really look awesome (4 out of 5). And the Russian LPCM 5.1 is really a powerful force since the star of the audio are the trains – with the choo-chooing, the chug-chuging, the sound of the fire in the engine room, the screaching of the breaks, and so on. A very nice audio mix! There is only one funny thing with the soundtrack – whenever the German character speaks German, there’s a female Russian voice-over because Russians don’t like subtitles – they love their live-translations. But it’s not that distracting, and the German character doesn’t speak that much, so it wasn’t a big deal. The English subtitles were translated excellent eventhough they were a bit on the small side. The extras are a bunch of making ofs (non-subtitled).
If you like movies about trains and if you know what to expect from the typical pacing of Russian movies, then I recommend this film. Others expecting an intense action train movie may be disappointed.
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