Mr. Tamahori is not a natural action director, especially in the large-scale chase and shootout sequences, and the climax, aboard a flaming jetliner, is more numbing than thrilling.
But prose fiction is a poor medium for the shootouts, action sequences and high-octane thrills that are cinema and video games' stock-in-trade.
A tense freeway shootout and car/foot/rail chase sequence aside (the latter plays like a sombre variation on a theme from The French Connection), A Most Violent Year keeps its action tinder largely dry, the fireworks generated instead by tense conversations between husbands and wives, lawyers and district attorneys, police and putative thieves.
Critic Alan Sepinwall, writing on Hitfix.com about the nominated episode of "Breaking Bad," observes: "Director Michelle MacLaren has been behind the camera for the series' most exciting action sequence (the shootout at the end of 'One Minute'), and arguably its most visually stunning episode ('4 Days Out'), and I think she may have just topped the latter.
During the first shootout scene in the episode, Miller wanted to make the sequence as real as possible by having the camera film as if it was under attack.
Individual sequences shine: a climactic shootout gets a spooky visual treatment, as the ghosts of images from previous pages intrude on the frame — a canny illustration of the way time and memory warp in moments of violence.
The "Uncharted" franchise has been defined by remarkable action sequences — a full-on shootout on a moving train, a somersaulting Jeep, an extended battle of man versus helicopter.
A climactic sequence in Mr. Fleischer's original version involved a shootout with machine guns in a movie theater.
The game made an appearance later that May at the E3 show in 2005, where four sections were demonstrated: a third-person shootout, an interrogation scene, a computer tech minigame and a driving sequence.
