hearthstoneivan 7.5/10 Watching Demolition felt like being spoon-fed caviar. The one who feeds you expects both appreciation of its fine taste and a complete lack of skills regarding the use of silverware. While all that caviar is still appetizing, it would be a lot better if you didn't hear a "Choo Choo, open your mouth!" whenever the ordeuver is tasted. As ever Gyllenhall has been fantastic playing a grieving quirky character, whose letters serve both as therapy and exposition devices for the audience. Naomi Watts is a bit underused, as a melanchonicly calm woman with a redneck husband and a rebellious kid. The journey is tight and collected, opposed to the behavior of these individuals whose story we follow. Everyone talks in an odd, overexplainable manner, which kind of bothered me throughout. As Gyllenhalls character says: "Everything has become a metaphor", you feel spoiled with all this unnecessary commentary of things meant to be subtle. We all know that him destroying his house, acting sporadically and delving into small issues isn't just a random eccentricity, but an allegory for his suffering. Speaking of suffering, Judah Lewis convincingly plays a teenage brat with an internal conflict of his own. Seeing a great kid actor nowadays is always a breath of fresh air.Conclusion: Demolition explores themes that have the need to be explored, though not with a sledgehammer and a hunting knife. It's short, tight and persuasively watchable, despite so on-the-nose. Worth watching for the great performances and the wonderful character interactions.

jerryh-20995 Wait, we're supposed to believe that all this mourning is over someone who cheated on him and had an abortion behind his back? What? But I guess all sins are forgiven because of those big puppy dog eyes she had. Here, have a carousel. Then he tells the kid that he's going to have a hard life if he is gay, when we all know it's cooler to be gay than straight these days. Wait, but it gets even better when he apologizes to the parents that hid the cheating/abortion from him.

Claudio Carvalho The investment broker Davis Mitchell (Jake Gyllenhaal) is married with Julia (Heather Lind) and works at his father-in-law's firm in New York City. One day, Julia is driving her car with Davis and another car crashes and kills Julia. In the hospital, Davis purchases a chocolate bar in a vendor machine but the candy is stuck in the machine. Davis writes a strange letter to the owner of the piece of equipment reporting the malfunction and the costumer service representative Karen Moreno (Naomi Watts) contacts him. Meanwhile he becomes unstable and obsessed with a weird behavior at work and his father-in-law Phil Eastwood (Chris Cooper) asks him to take some days off. Davis befriends the pothead Karen and her gay teenage son Chris (Judah Lewis) while he tries to erase his former life and build a new one."Demolition" is an overrated film with a messy story and great cast. The attitude of Davis Mitchell grieving the loss of his wife is awkward. His friendship with Karen is terrible and quite inexplicable even for a seriously disturbed man. His decision to literally demolish his loveless married life destroying everything is ridiculous. But the worst is when he learns that he was a cuckold and begins to honor Julia. Summarizing, an awful story. My vote is three.Title (Brazil): "Demolição" ("Demolition")

jimbo-53-186511 Davis Mitchell (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a successful investment banker working for his father-in-law's firm. Tragedy strikes for Davis when his wife Julia (Heather Lind) is killed in a car accident. Shortly after his wife is pronounced dead, Davis has a problem with a vending machine and writes several letters of complaint to the vending machine company, which leads to Davis striking up a friendship with Karen (Naomi Watts) a customer service representative at the vending machine company who is touched by the content of his letters. Davis, with the help of Karen, goes on a voyage of self-discovery after the death of his wife, but the unconventional methods he employs to deal with his wife's death don't meet with approval for those closest to him.Presumably, Demolition is intended as a character study and I can see that an interesting film could have been made out of the character of Davis - he's seemingly an emotionally-retarded man incapable of showing emotion or grief in the conventional sense of the word. In the opening segments of the film, his wife criticises him for not really paying attention, but later in the film we can see that he is actually observant and fairly regimental when going about his daily routine. To me though, it seemed that he only focuses his attention on what is important to him and isn't really interested in what is important to anyone else. The film suggests (as far as I could gather) that there may have been psychological issues with Davis - him being unable to emote or show concern over his wife's death and I really wish that these psychological issues would have had more bearing on the story.Davis' unconventional method of dealing with his wife's death is interesting in its early stages; his desire to open everything up and see how it works may have been a metaphor about his own existence - essentially stripping everything away about himself and rebuilding himself possibly as a better person. As things progress, Davis gets worse and worse and the moment he pays a group of builders to help them knock a house down is the point where we start to learn that Davis is deeply troubled. This aspect of the story is quite interesting and fun to watch (for a while), but once we get to this point there isn't really any further development of Gyllenhaal's character and at this point in the film it goes from being fun and interesting to being tiresome and repetitive.As well as Davis' own life struggle the film has other threads such as Karen's marital problems and her son Chris and his struggle with his sexuality. These themes are littered throughout the film and are covered in dribs and drabs, but never really to an extent that you're able to become emotionally invested in these themes or in the characters. Admittedly, the former thread isn't that interesting, but the latter theme is and perhaps could have been expanded further. I think this is part of the problem with this film in that it has lots of ideas and themes, but at 98 minutes long it perhaps doesn't have the running time to develop all of its ideas and as a result it comes across as being a bit muddled and cluttered at times.Still the acting is pretty good and it is interesting in its early stages and despite some of its problems it never falls into the realms of being unwatchable, but at the same time it's never as interesting as it could have been and when the film ended I felt as though I knew as much about Davis at the end as I did at the start. In my book, Demolition is something of a failure, but it is, at least at times, a moderately interesting failure.