Does no one else regard the whole premise of the main plot to be flawed? The three flatmates did not kill Hugo - he died naturally and any postmortem would have confirmed this. There was no need to dismember or even hide the body. They could have continued with the plan to call the police, kept the money, and pleaded total ignorance if (unlikely) they were asked Hugo had left anything valuable.
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I completely agree. It is just utterly ludicrous and unbelievable that they didn't just keep the money and call the police. Beyond moronic.
shareNeither ludicrous nor unbelievable at all, for the reasons cited by MrRazor et al. above. If they call the police, they might as well put up a neon sign saying "This is where Hugo was last alive, and if you bad guys haven't found the suitcase full of cash already, now you know where it probably is."
shareYou forgot one important detail: one of them went completely NUTS in a way that is completely understandable. The same understament we got from the unpredictable way they (we could/would as audience) react when *beep* happens, things few people portrait themselves in
And that's what makes it different from other formulaic scripts
but then they had to face the authorities immediately
shareThe point is they didn't and it would have been a pretty boring movie had they just done that and kept the money. I still think David would have gone mental because you can't just put £1mn in a bank you have to still hide it some how, and the three would have turned on each other like they did to keep the money. The film is really about greed. Hugo dying is just an ignition to the story.
shareThe point is they didn't and it would have been a pretty boring movie had they just done that and kept the money.
Yeah, it seems would have been easier just to hide the suitcase and call the police. Dealing with the bad guys is another thing though.
shareIt's been a while since I saw the film so correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to remember that when they found Hugo's body, they also found a stash of drugs. Put that together with Hugo turning up for his meeting with all three of them to discuss him having the spare room and presenting them with a wad of cash and not really telling them about his life up to that point, it's really not hard to piece together that it was dodgy money. Which means that some division of the police force would no doubt be very interested in finding it. If they called the police about Hugo's death, even if they hid the suitcase beforehand, it's very likely that at some point down the line, the money would become an issue.
Plus, these aren't exactly upright moral citizens to begin with. From the very beginning they're rude, obnoxious, and self-centred - they don't even seem to particularly get on with each other as people. They find the body and (IIRC) neither Alex nor Juliet particularly care, and David stops caring as soon as he sees the money. Of course the only thing they're really going to be focused on is how to get as much of the money as possible rather than thinking rationally about how to proceed. That's what the entire premise of the movie is based on.
In any case, this isn't a plot flaw. A plot flaw is something that doesn't make sense even within the laws of the universe a work of fiction has constructed for itself. Their decisions, while yes any intelligent and moral person would disagree with them, make perfect sense when you take into consideration what kind of people the characters are.
Someday I'm gonna make a movie then laugh watching people over-analyse it
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Agreed. Plus, why keep the money all together creating mistrust and paranoia? Why not immediately hand each flatmate their ‘share’?
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