★★
“More kill than craft.”
There is potential in the idea here. It’s a shame it ends up feeling like two separate movies, both of which come out feeling under-cooked. The main focus is on Marina Delon (Loutsis), a teenage girl with the typical teenage girl problems, e.g. bickering parents, generally sullen demeanour, etc. Except, her dad Thomas (Paré) is actually an assassin, working for the very strange Poe (Oberst). This has contributed to the marital strife, because his work is why mom is in a wheel-chair – and is not happy about it, to put it mildly. However, things are up-ended after Thomas is killed on a job, and Marina decides to take over the family business.
Thee are a few interesting directions this could perhaps have gone. Unfortunately, it doesn’t take any of them. Instead, things rumble vaguely on, with Marina doing not very exciting murders for hire, sometimes with the help of her Gother than thou BFF Freya (Eggleston), and to varying success. Such as trying to kill the estranged wife of a gangster, which only results in a bit of flirty chit-chat with the target’s son. Communication with Poe is entirely through dead-drops, so he has no idea his assassin is now a teen girl, until his boss informs him descriptions of the killer no longer resemble Michael Paré. Poe decides to tidy up the loose ends, by terminating what remains of the family.
Why it feels like two films, is mostly because the director can’t seem to commit to whether it should be Marina’s story or Poe’s. It could have been both, adopting a Leon-esque approach of Poe taking her under his wing. However, the two barely share a few seconds of screen-time before the final shootout. Instead, we get unconvincing family drama, e.g. Marina being upset her father isn’t attending the recital at which she is unconvincingly playing the violin, or even weirder stuff such as Poe digging up the grave of his dead mother. I’d actually have been fine with more of the latter – few do unrepentantly weird better than Oberst [he has done a one-man stage show adapting Edgar Allen Poe stories, incidentally, giving resonance to his character name here], and he’s much better an actor than Loutsis.
For whatever reason, I kept expecting some dramatic twist, such as Freya being a figment of Marina’s imagination. I mean, we first meet the pair digging animal graves behind her house, which sets an odd tone for the film from the beginning. The fact Marina and Poe both… have issues, is another way this could have developed. But once we’ve established Marina is taking over – and with remarkable vagueness on the details there – the film more or less grinds to a halt, dramatically and thematically. With action sequences which are no more than competent, despite some gore which is occasionally amusingly excessive, this is one you can afford to miss, despite Oberst’s best efforts.
Dir: Mark Savage
Star: Sanae Loutsis, Isis Eggleston, Michael Paré, Bill Oberst Jr.