Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

I'll write about the positive and negative aspects of this movie.One positive thing about this movie is the camera work. It is done in decent lighting and really shows the atmosphere that it tries to create. The acting is convincing and not over-acted.The movie is incredibly cliché and shows a huge lack in originality and it also tries to send a political message. Two Europeans in America are chased by a Chinese man with a gun. These Europeans in this movie have feelings and are real persons. The Chinese man is just a criminal without any personality in this movie. Just a plain murderer.This movie still gets a 1 out of 10 for the camera work. It doesn't get a higher score, because it's a very racist movie.

When it comes to the crazy side of the coin, one of two things would have solved this young couple's dilemma: #1 Ditch the phone #2 Turn the damn ringer off, put it on vibrate or something. Then, as soon as you confirm that you will more than likely be killed before you'd be able to get any money, DITCH THE PHONE. and then change your blasted yellow outfits. This can be done long before prego GF is forced to run miles up and down stairs and into traffic, almost guaranteeing a miscarriage.Seriously, if you and your prego GF find a cell phone in a cab and foreigners start calling it and talking all kinds of scary mess, chuck that s--- out the window and get on with your life.Also, if you abandon my sound advice and the two of you find yourselves running and hiding from an Asian guy with a gun, tell your prego GF to stop making so many unnecessary piercing vocal noises- because this, along with the bright yellow matching hipster outfits, makes it really hard to hide from a gunman. Potential for a lot of suspense. But I had to constantly and viciously swat away nagging questions about their illogical behavior just to get some slight enjoyment out of this could-be suspenseful drama. And then the movie ends, and we assume they live happily ever after out of wed lock.

In "Uncertainty" a young couple's lives have different paths to take based on the flip of the coin. But they don't tell us what this coin toss means or its significance, so we don't get to understand its implications or consequences.The young couple is played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Lynn Collins. Gordon-Levitt is a talented actor and is good here, but he's better than the character. We are given no reasons to care about these characters and we know so little about them it just makes everything less interesting. I don't know much about Collins, but from this all I can gather is that she only knows how to play sexy. I would like to think that Gordon-Levitt would pick girlfriends based on more than just sexiness."Uncertainty" is supposed to be an interesting examination of lives travelling different ways, but the plot devices used are so lame that the two stories are just uninteresting. It is shot well for its low budget, but one should be wary of watching movies written without a script.

Time-travel. Of all the various things that cinema has to offer, its play on temporal motifs by using the illusion of real-time action and changing it via editing to disestablish real-time movement from continuitous, straightforward action is one of the greatest gifts it brings art. What we have here is a relatively simple concept that nevertheless gets rare play in cinema, a sort of quantum possibilities narrative that usually requires a device (Primer) but only rarely is done just for the dramatic effect (Sliding Doors). A couple meets on the Brooklyn Bridge (Gordon-Levitt and Lynn Collins, playing characters named Kate and Bobby, counterrespectively) on the 4th of July. They cannot decide whether to go to a barbecue chez Kate's family, or spend the evening tout le doux. So they break off, running in two different directions, and live entirely different lives over the next 24 hours. Green-clad couple Kate and Bobby meet up in a car and go to the barbecue. Yellow-clad K&B grab a taximeter cab and are on their way downtown. Green are going to find that their dinner is met with family politics, secrets revealed, uncomfortable situations, and melodrama. Yellow are going to find themselves immersed in a lottery conspiracy that will threaten their very lives. The two stories are cross-cut together and developments in the one affect the understanding of motivations and choices in the other, while those things that speckle daily lives such as cellphones, computers, and trains stand as rough bridging points between the two stories.Very fun, as well as I'm wondering if Siegel and McGehee read themselves some Mark Z. Danielewsky before or while writing this script (the yellow and green flip-side of character development preexists in Danielewsky's Only Revolutions, a book where the same story is told from two different perspectives of a couple, and, like this movie, contains a revolving narrative that brings the characters back to the starting point). The careful attention to maintaining the color coding of the story lines (including splashes of yellow at times when things in the green story get threatening, or splashes of green at times when the yellow story gets safer), is pulled off really well. From there, however, the narrative is a little unbalanced, though in some ways that allow me to appreciate the risk the filmmakers are taking.See, we are in fact having to relate emotionally to the subtle dramatic narrative arc of one story while simultaneously engaging in the pulse-pounding suspense of the other. That means for the larger part of the movie, I and I feel many other audiences get impatient with the more subtle, delicate moments in the family because they're so eager to see what will happen next in the race for their lives. Ultimately this unbalance is fractured further by the end, where the endings of both arcs reveal the ultimate difference between such modes of storytelling, as the open ending serves the dramatic side very well in terms of conflict resolution, but the open ending of the thriller side just makes it feel like the filmmakers had to end it for lack of a better idea. Which, unfortunately, may have been the case. The meeting of polarities at the end with the characters coming to the same conclusion feels more forced than it should.This is unfortunate considering that the whole movie (called "Uncertainty", after all) is about the difficulty of making choices. So when it feels like the filmmakers themselves had a difficult time choosing how to end their movie, it sort of breaks apart the whole point of the movie in the first place. However, this is also a situation in which I do not believe I would have come up with a better ending myself. The methods in which the two stories inform each other is too important to risk losing by having the characters end up in vastly different places. The ultimate decision the characters have to make as regards their relationship still HAS TO be made in both narrative arcs, so we can't as well have the characters end up the worst or the better for having made an otherwise insignificant decision as regards their day. If this movie struggles, it mostly has to do with the fact that it contains such strongly contrasting and hard to cut between genres as the romantic drama versus the suspense thriller.Nevertheless, the most exciting and fun thing about watching the movie is watching how the characters, incapable of being definitive and strong when surrounded by the pressures of family, are completely forced to make minute-by-minute decisions that they are required to commit to while running through the streets trying not to get killed.So yes, this movie is not perfect. But as Gordon-Levitt says, "If the story is good, I'm in. It's that simple." This movie is pretty awesome when taken on its own merit.--PolarisDiB