Category: Review

In The Fade

  By

★★★
“Death wish, too.”

I spent most of the movie going back and forth as to whether or not this qualified for inclusion here. Was its lead, perhaps, just too subdued and reactive to be called an “action heroine”? It wasn’t until after the very final scene that I finally was able to decide it does merit a spot. Though make no mistake, this is a long, slow-burning fuse before it goes off.

The life of Katja Şekerci (Kruger) is torn apart when a bomb is left outside her husband’s office, killing both him and their young son. Initially, the cops suspect his past has caught up with him – he did time in prison for dealing hashish. While Katja believes otherwise, matters are not helped by Katja’s relapse into drug-use to deal with the pain. Eventually, she is proven right, and the police arrest a husband and wife pair of neo-Nazis (Hilsdorf and Brandhoff). They are tried, but the law fails to deliver the justice Katja wants, and she is forced to take matters into her own hands, despite the pleas of her lawyer (Moschitto) to trust the system.

As vigilante movies go… this one probably doesn’t. It’s instead divided into three acts: the first covers the explosion and its immediate impact; the second the trial; and the third what ensues thereafter, as Katja tracks down the perpetrators. In a more traditional genre entry, the first two would be disposed of in about 15 minutes, but here, they’re much more the focus. In particular, we see, in almost painful detail, Katja’s progress through the stages of grief – though it’s less a passage through them, and more a downward spiral towards a pitch-black version of acceptance. Indeed, she’s in the middle of a suicide attempt, filmed in disturbingly chill passivity, when she gets news of the terrorists’ arrests.

I have some issues with certain aspects of the plot. For instance, her conviction this was a terrorist attack, while eventually right, seems to come out of thin air. I’m also less than certain it’s quite as easy to make a bomb as is suggested [I’m pretty sure  – and certainly hope – that even looking up instructions on Google would quickly get you watched, especially given the circumstances here] However, her single-minded dedication to punish those she holds responsible, regardless of the personal cost, is striking, and there’s no arguments about the strength of Kruger’s portrayal either, which is excellent. You truly feel her grief, and this makes everything she does subsequently, a natural product of it.

Confucius supposedly said, “Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.” This is a feature adaptation of that concept, with Katja more or less fatally wounded – at least, inside – along with her husband and child. This is not an uplifting film by any means. Indeed, it manages to become more depressing the longer it goes on, and considering the real starting point is a six-year-old being literally blown into pieces, that’s quite a feat. Not necessarily a bad thing, of course; although the net result is a film of merit, yet one I’m unlikely to watch again.

Dir: Fatih Akin
Star: Diane Kruger, Denis Moschitto, Hanna Hilsdorf, Ulrich Brandhoff
a.k.a. Aus dem Nichts

Raazi

  By

★★★★
“The Spy Who Loved Me”

This Indian spy thriller manages to be both remarkably restrained and human, avoiding a potentially jingoistic approach, and going for something considerably more measured. It takes place just before the war between India and Pakistan in 1971, when Indian agent Hidayat Khan is pretending to give information to Pakistan. In order to get close to their top brass, he convinces his daughter, Sehmat (Bhatt), to enter an arranged marriage to Iqbal Syed (Ahlawat), an officer whose father (Sharma) is a Brigadier in the Pakistani army. After being trained by senior intelligence officer Khalid Mir (Kaushal), she goes to join her new husband, and begins operations as a spy inside the Brigadier’s household.

From there, it’s a series of tense incidents, with a servant becoming increasingly suspicious of Sehmat, but her also falling for Iqbal, and realizing that the enemy are not so different. These conflicting loyalties create emotional carnage, not least when she has to kill multiple people in order to protect her mission. [One of whom is killed using an umbrella laden with a ricin pellet, which is odd, since this was seven years before the KGB used exactly this method to assassinate a dissident, Georgi Markov] She does succeed in sending back vital information to Mir, but he has great difficulty in getting the Indian military to take the data seriously, being uncorroborated evidence from a rookie agent. When the Pakistanis start rolling up Sehmat’s local support cell, it becomes a race against time to extract her before she is caught in the net.

What I particularly liked about this was Sehmat’s “ordinariness”: she has no amazing abilities or combat skills. She is brave, smart and very committed, yet far from immune to the hellish toll a mission like this takes, especially on the psyche of someone thoroughly unprepared for it. The film does a much better job of depicting this than, say, Red Sparrow, in particular with an ending which is genuinely poignant, and a far cry from the black and white depiction which I was expecting. There’s as much ground to criticize the Indian side – not least for their cynical exploitation of a young girl’s desire to satisfy the wishes of her father – as the Pakistani one.

This was one of the highest-grossing Bollywood movies with a female lead ever, trailing only romantic comedy sequel Tanu Weds Manu Returns, and it’s easy to understand why. About the only misstep I can think of, was giving Sehmat’s father lung cancer, as if relying on her daughter’s sense of filial obligation and patriotism wasn’t sufficient moral blackmail. It’s a sloppy and unnecessary bit of early melodrama, whose lack of subtlety is severely at odds with the rest of the film. In a world where most spy movies treat death as a throwaway trifle, this goes a long way to remind us that the taking of another human’s life is absolutely not a trivial matter, regardless of the reason.

Dir: Meghna Gulzar
Star: Alia Bhatt, Jaideep Ahlawat, Vicky Kaushal, Shishir Sharma

Tragedy Girls

  By

★★★
“Like, rather than retweet.”

Playing like a more social media-conscious version of Heathers, the central characters are high school girls McKayla (Shipp) and Sadie (Hildebrand). They believe their town of Rosedale is the hunting territory of a serial killer, whom the police won’t acknowledge, and the girls have a (not very successful) blog, Tragedy Girls, about the case. The pair succeed in luring out and capturing the killer (Durand), and discover that if they continue operating in his name, they and their site experiences a rise in popularity.

Except, murderin’ ain’t easy, especially when their initial crimes are dismissed by authorities to avoid causing a panic. McKayla and Sadie clearly need to step up their game. Except as things escalate, there’s a growing sense of dissension in the ranks, both with regard to the directions each feels they should take with their efforts, and over Jordan (Quaid), a cute classmate who help edit videos for the site… Will it be “Sisters before misters”? Or are those creative differences going to lead to the band splitting up, just as they achieve their desired fame?

The target here is obvious, yet certainly worthy of repeated stabbing with a sharp object. I have a deep disdain for the vapid lives of Internet “celebrities”, who measure themselves purely in the number of likes, follows and shares social media, and will do whatever it takes to get them. The reductio ad absurdum in this case is that even cold-blooded murder is not beyond the pale, if it gets these attention-seekers what they crave. It’s a depressingly accurate view of unformed teenage morality, that the end justifies the means.

Credit MacIntyre for clearly knowing his horror stuff, from an opening scene which is as much a parody of slasher films as an introduction. Chris initially mistook it for the real thing, turning to ask me with dripping sarcasm, “And what is the title of this gem?” [A subsequent, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it reference to the amazing Martyrs, was the point in my initial viewing where I stopped, realizing this merited watching with her]. He also has the guts to take the premise to its logical, and very dark, conclusion –  here, it does surpass Heathers, which in one early version ended in the entire school blowing up. Given current cultural squeamishness led to a TV series based on Heathers being canned entirely in the US, this is no small feat.

Yet in other ways, it’s still well short of its inspiration. Neither of the leads have the likeability Winona Ryder brought to Veronica Sawyer, everyone else is here depicted as little more than occasionally useful idiots, and the dialogue fails to ‘pop’ in the immensely quotable way Daniel Waters’ script achieved. These factors help lead to a middle section in desperate need of both escalation and an antagonist – other than the one who spends most of the film locked up in a basement. If still worth a look, and rarely less than interesting, I doubt anyone will be rebooting this in 25 years.

Dir: Tyler MacIntyre
Star: Alexandra Shipp, Brianna Hildebrand, Kevin Durand, Jack Quaid

Critical Salvage, by Steve Richer

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Literary rating: ★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆½

This is briskly functional rather than particularly memorable: by which I mean, I read the book in fairly short order… only to discover, when I finished it, that I didn’t remember very much about it. Not even the heroine’s name. Mallory? Mindy? Miley? Definitely an M word… Ah, yes: Melody Cale. She’s an agent for the Geirty Solutional Diversity Group, a murky government organization – also known as the Get Shit Done Group – who “do what the CIA couldn’t… without having politicians, or reporters, looking over their shoulders.”

In this case, it’s cleaning up after a CIA operation goes wrong, and a plane goes down in the Nicaraguan jungle. The cargo, code-named “Woodland Kaiser”, needs to be recovered before it falls into the wrong hands. Which would be these of The Homestead, an equally murky group of unknown origins and motives. They contract out the search to murky [yeah, it’s like that…] Latin American drug-lord, Rojas. The GSDG send Melody, and she teams up with Owen Wright, a British ex-soldier whose father was killed by one of Rojas’s minions, and who is much more interested in revenge than a salvage operation.

Indeed, Melody appears more interested in finding out the identity of Rojas then recovering the target. It’s not long before she has abandoned the search for Woodland Kaiser entirely, not to mention the entire American continent. She is instead hob-nobbing with the rich and famous, jetting off to the Cannes Film Festival, for reasons which remain – all together, now! – murky. This is particularly dubious since, it turns out, when Owen puts his mind to it, he’s able to locate the crash site in about a page. You didn’t think it would be that easy, did you? You know, for a second there…

If you put issues of logic and common sense aside, this works much better, and it’s ideal beach material: a slick page-turner, in which bullets fly and the villain has a seaside lair nicknamed “The Aquarium”, with one glass wall below the water-level, looking out into the ocean. [Memo to self: if ever I become an evil overlord, and construct anywhere nicknamed “The Aquarium,” I will be sure to use bullet-proof materials…] This is involved in the best section, forming the book’s climax, when the stronghold is stormed by Melody, with the assistance of Adriana Tiscareno, a businesswoman she initially suspects of being “Rojas”.

The heroine is something of a cypher. It might have been nice to have learned more about her origins, and how she became such a hard-ass. For comparison, the blurb claims “Fans of Atomic Blonde, Nikita and Alias will love Critical Salvage” – two of those three did explain how their heroines came to be, and those were important parts of the story. While this ties up all its loose ends nicely, and works perfectly well as a stand-alone, it perhaps feels more like a third or fourth book, rather than an introduction. But if I’m in need of some holiday reading down the stretch, future volumes would merit consideration.

Author: Steve Richer
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon as an e-book or paperback
Book 1 of 1 in the Mercury Cale series.

Prodigy

  By

★★★★
“Hannibal Lecter’s kid sister, crossed with Carrie”

This small-scale production – a cast of little more than half a dozen, and one location, not counting the park scenes which bookend it – packs a wallop significantly above its weight. Psychiatrist Jimmy Fonda (Neil) is brought into a military facility by an old friend, Olivia (Andersen), to interview a young girl, Ellie (Liles), who is being held there. To avoid pre-judging her case, Fonda deliberately avoids reading the documentation about her with which he has been provided. But the stringent security precautions (“In the event the subject escapes the restraints, drop to the floor and cover your head”) under which she’s held, should give him a clue that this is far from a normal nine-year-old. If it didn’t, the conversation with her which follows certainly does.

For Ellie is incredibly bright, and completely sociopathic. Turns out she killed her mother, and also possesses freakish paranormal talents of telekinesis, which is why she’s locked up in this military facility. However, her wilful rejection of all authority has led those in charge – Colonel Birch (Palame) in particular – to the conclusion that euthanasia is the only option available, given the threat she poses. Olivia, who still believes in Ellie’s humanity, called in Fonda as a last hurrah to prove the young girl is salvageable before she is put down. Ellie, however, is having none of it, and seems intent on embracing her fate. Is this just a facade, or is she as incorrigibly dangerous as the authorities believe?

With such a low-key approach, a lot is riding on the performances of the two leads, and both Neil and Liles hit it out of the park. For a film which, for the great majority of the time, is nothing more than two people talking to each other, it’s remarkably engrossing to watch the two fencing for intellectual dominance. The chess game which they play is perhaps rather too obvious a metaphor for what’s going on here, yet it remains fascinating throughout. Even the slightly stilted and artificial nature of Liles’s performance – par for the course in almost any actor of her age – works for the character, because we’re unsure to what extent Ellie is, indeed, delivering a part she has decided to play.

The effects are generally similarly low-key, but used effectively to enhance things, from the first glimpse we get of Ellie’s powers through to the higher-tier unleashing of them. You could argue that the end is predictable; however, the way the set-up is constructed, there are really only two ways this can logically end. Either Fonda succeeds. or he doesn’t. Your mileage may vary as to which you think is more plausible, and whether or not the film-makers agree with you. I’ll confess we differed in our opinions, yet the journey there was still more than entertaining enough to allow me to shake hands and part on very good terms with the film.

Dir: Alex Haughey, Brian Vidal, Nathan Leon
Star: Richard Neil, Savannah Liles, Jolene Andersen, Emilio Palame

Peppermint

  By

★★★
“A case of Miss-Taken identity.”

I’m tempted to award this an extra half-star, simply for pissing off liberal film critics, upset by the fact that most of the film is devoted to a white woman killing Latino drug dealers. Of course, they completely miss all the points, instead complaining – and these are direct quotes – there is “not a word about corporate complicity in the opioid crisis” and that the heroine’s “true enemy is a system of income inequality driven by hyper-capitalism.” Because, of course, if was hyper-capitalism which gunned down the husband and daughter of Riley North (Garner) in the parking lot of a fun-fair. Oh, my mistake: it was Latino drug dealers.

The main complaint though, is it “bought into the political rhetoric that conflates gang members with law-abiding immigrants.” Uh, speaking as a thoroughly law-abiding immigrant: no, it doesn’t. I never felt at all conflated. But then, I never regarded Trainspotting as any kind of indication that all Scottish people are heroin addicts. For that’s the mistake critics like this keep making, going all the way back those who claimed Basic Instinct was homophobic: taking characters in a film as statements about that group as a whole. As one defense of the film wrote, “all too many members of the Left have reacted to Trump allegedly making gang members represent immigrants by, yes, making gang members represent immigrants.”

Enough politics. The important question here is, is this revenge-driven vigilante pic any good? To which the answer is… somewhat. There’s certainly nothing much new or innovative in the story. After the shooting described above, the scumbags responsible get off, and Riley goes on her mission of vengeance, killing not only those directly responsible, but those on both sides of law she feels were culpable. That involves going all the way up the food chain to Diego Garcia (Raba), the drug boss who ordered the hit, though Riley takes no small pleasure in destroying his organization on the way, not least the piñata factory which operates as a distribution hub.

The film seems to leave a slew of opportunities on the table. For example, the five years before Riley’s mission got under way, when she was living off the grid and acquiring the “very particular set of skills” [director Morel also helmed Taken] necessary for the task. Or the way she operates as an “angel” for the homeless inhabitants of Skid Row. Or the social media debate, mentioned in passing, which her vigilante actions against Garcia and his gang has kick-started. Or Riley’s eventual payback against another mother for a long-ago wrong. Expanding on any of these might have offered more interesting ways to go, rather than being mostly a clone of this year’s Bruce Willis vehicle, Death Wish, in itself a remake that added little to the 1974 original.

Instead, we are left with little more than a competent exercise in Garner returning to her Alias roots, though as such it’s entertaining enough. The fights here are crisply handled, reaching a peak on the piñata warehouse assault, I’d say – an environment which offers a great deal of opportunity for innovative carnage. It’s the bits in between which are the problem, setting up interesting angles, then failing miserably to take advantage of them, instead offering almost as much footage of the cops chasing Riley (Ortiz and Gallagher). And at least it’s not Elektra, the film effectively responsible for killing off comic-book action heroines for a decade, as well as putting Garner’s career in big-budget movies on life-support. We can be grateful for that, I suppose.

Dir: Pierre Morel
Star: Jennifer Garner, Juan Pablo Raba, John Ortiz, John Gallagher Jr.

La querida del Centauro

  By

★★★
“This land is Yolanda…”

A sold enough entry, this benefits from a well-written script, but gets marks taken off for having a heroine who is rather too passive. Yolanda Acosta (Paleta) is sent to a higher security facility when she is recaptured, following an escape from her previous prison. It’s a mixed-gender facility (common in Mexico), and she comes to the attention of Benedictino Suárez (Zurita), a.k.a. “Centaur”, a  local crime boss who is also incarcerated. He falls hard for Yolanda – the title translates as “Centaur’s Woman” – and when his escape plan comes to fruition, offers to bring her along with him, to the ranch on which he’s hiding out. And that’s where the problems really start for Yolanda.

Firstly, her teenage daughter, Cristina, is on the outside, being taken care of by Yolanda’s sleazy step-mom., who is trying to sell off Cristina’s virginity. Second, is the ensuing power struggle between Centaur and a rival; using Cristina as leverage, Yolanda is coerced into going undercover at a local gym where they operate. Third? Local cop Gerardo Duarte (Brown) who wants to use Yolanda to arrest Centaur. Initially, he offers immunity to her, but eventually their relationship becomes more… personal. Finally, and by no means least: did I forget to mention Centaur is married? And his wife, Julia (de la Mora) does not take kindly to rivals; on her orders, one of Yolanda’s cellmates has an eye gouged out.

You have to feel for the heroine, whose chief concern is simply wanting the best for her daughter. But every time Yolanda tries to do the right thing, circumstances conspire to foil her, and she inevitably ends up mired in deeper trouble. It reaches almost Shakespearean level of tragedy, with death following in her wake, from prison to the ranch. Even Duarte ends up believed by most to be dead, though this is mostly for the benefit of his health. since there’s a mole inside the police department who is funneling information to the cartel. He’s left to carry on his investigation as a “ghost”, with the help of allies on the force, which complicates his efforts to help Yolanda and Cristina extricate themselves.

The performances are solid enough, and the characters here almost all occupy a morally grey middle-area. You may not endorse their actions, yet you can see why they decided there was a need for them. I was particularly impressed by de la Mora, whose portrayal of Julia puts her over as both smart and brutal. She knows her position as Centaur’s “legitimate” woman leads to both power and risk, and wields the former to mitigate the latter. She also keeps incriminating evidence about Centaur elsewhere, with a “dead woman’s switch” of regular text messages, and instructions to release it in the event the messages stop. That’s genius.

I’d like to have seen Yolanda be rather more active. Admittedly, her options are limited, especially once her daughter comes under the control of Centaur as well. However, she is set up in the prison as a character with no qualms about getting tough when necessary. Once she’s back on the outside, that physicality seems almost to evaporate for 30-odd episodes. When she goes undercover in the gym, she ends up having to face Lola, a relation of Centaur’s rival who has taken a dislike to Yolanda, in an unsanctioned match. Otherwise, she seems curiously reluctant to get her hands dirty, even in defense of Cristina, and with no shortage of firearms around, of which she could take advantage.

The rest of the show, however, is quite savage for a TV series; one death in particular is by head-shot of impressive nature, more befitting The Walking Dead. It ticks along quite nicely, though it’s never less than obvious whereabout we’re going to end up, more or less from the point Yolanda arrives on the ranch. We eventually get there, and the table is set for a second season. Not sure the sequel will exactly become a priority, yet I’ll leave this show on my Netflix watch-list for potential viewing.

Created by : Lina Uribe and Darío Vanegas
Star: Ludwika Paleta, Humberto Zurita, Michel Brown, Alexandra de la Mora

BuyBust

  By

★★★
“Slum dogs and millionaires.”

The unapologetically brutal war on drugs being waged in the Philippines by hard-line President Rodrigo Duterte has come in for criticism abroad – and this film chips in to the argument from his home turf. Philippines DEA agent Nina Manigan (Curtis) is assigned to a new team, the sole survivor of her previous squad, killed after being betrayed to the drug gangs. Their new mission is to arrest leading boss Biggie Chen (Atayde), luring him out of the slum where he operates to a more vulnerable spot. However, at the last second, Chen changes the location of the meet, and despite misgivings, the squad enter the Gracia ni Maria area which is Chen’s home turf. To no great surprise, this turns out to be an ambush. Half the squad is wiped out in the initial assault, and with Chen jamming their calls for backup, Nina and the surviving members have to try and make their way out of a severely hostile environment.

The closest cousins are probably a couple of other foreign-language cop pics: Brazil’s Elite Squad and Indonesia’s The Raid. It has the moral ambivalence of the former, being set in a world where “by any means necessary” is the standard credo of law enforcement. This is combined with the relentless, action-driven approach of the latter, pitting a small group of cops in a confined space against a numerically superior and highly-motivated enemy. One problem is, those two movies are among my all-time favourites, both certainly ranking in the best action films of the 21st century. That’s a high bar for BuyBust to match, and it comes up short. What I took away was, there is a limit to how long you can go, before running gun-battles in murky alleys eventually become a bit tedious. And it’s considerably less than the 128-minute running time here.

It works better when adding more variety to proceedings, such as when the threat comes instead from the mercurial locals, whose loyalties cannot be relied on – they’re as fed up of the collateral damage caused by the police, as of the drug gangs themselves. And Curtis herself is surprisingly good, given her cinematic background hardly suggests hard-core action (she’s been a daytime TV host in the Philippines for almost a decade). She gets decent support from MMA giant Vera, who basically plays a tank, in a role surely destined for Dave Bautista in the inevitable Hollywood remake. Yet there’s clearly more to survival than mere size, just as there’s clearly more to making a good action film than copious quantities of ammunition.

In this case, editing half an hour of the less interesting stuff might well make for a significant improvement. These sections are more or less a group of faceless grunts exchanging fire with another group of faceless grunts, while scurrying through a poorly-lit slum. Less of this, and more of the start and end, where motivations become considerably clearer than what we see (or, rather, don’t see) in the middle, might have allowed this to live up to the level of its inspirations.

Dir: Erik Matti
Star: Anne Curtis, Brandon Vera, Arjo Atayde, Nonie Buencamino

The Serpent’s Fang, by Ryan Mullaney

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Literary rating: ★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆½

“Cara Loft, Room Trader…”

This book comes with a fairly lengthy note at the end, in which the author explains how he came to the idea here. Five words are all that were necessary: “I ripped off Lara Croft.” Because this is the closest I’ve yet seen to the literary version of an Asylum mockbuster movie, such as Tomb Invader. Globe-trotting locator of lost artifacts? Check. Remarkable gymnastic abilities? Check. Orphan? Check. I think it was when I read “Simone started to tie her hair into two braids”, that the eye-rolling began in earnest.

The story begins with her discovery of a lost city in Cambodia. While Simone Cassidy is recovering from that, she is recruited by a secretive quasi-governmental organization, to help them recover the titular blade. This ancient Aztec dagger is laden with legendary mystical energy, and the government want to stop it from falling into the wrong hands, those who would misuse its powers [not something a government would ever do, of course…] Initially reluctant, our heroine is lured into joining up with the promise of information about her parents – who, wouldn’t you know it, were also treasure hunters, before their untimely death. Cue more eye-rolling.

Naturally, they’re not the only ones after it. There is also Heather Severn and her colleagues at SWANN. Do not ask me what that stands for, because we are never told. We don’t learn much about their aims and motivations either, other than that they are “A private organization skilled in tactical combat.” They work for Felix Enderhoff, a private collector of artifacts who wants the Fang… because for him, it appears to be like Pokemon, and you gotta catch ’em all. When word seeps out that a clue to the location of the blade has been found in Mexico, he dispatches Heather and her team, aiming to beat Simone and her quasi-governmental colleague, Lincoln and April, to the punch.

From there, it’s a race through Mexico City to the clue, some gratuitous library-fu, then off into the jungle, and on towards the goal. The main thing we discover is that SWANN are actually more than a bit crap at tactical combat, failing on numerous occasions to take out Simone and her team, despite heavily out-numbering them, and Simone having virtually no fighting experience. Though her psychological qualms about using violence are actually one of the book’s few redeeming merits, and certainly fit in better than her pathological fear of… automobiles? While a result of the car crash which killed her parents 25 years earlier, all I could think of was an Indiana Jones-like line: “Cars. Why did it have to be cars…”

It’s all not very interesting, with little here you won’t have read or seen before. You don’t get much insight into either Simone’s character or the world which Mullaney wants to build. The Fang is no more than a McGuffin, and even when its powers are revealed [Felix, like all megavillains, simply has to be there at the denouement], they’ll provoke little more than “is that it?”. The book itself will probably do the same.

Author: Ryan Mullaney
Publisher: Sunbird Books, available through Amazon, only as an e-book.
Book 1 of 3 in the Treasure Huntress series.

Molly

  By

★★★★
“Dutch treat”

Up to a certain point (which I’ll get to in a bit), this low-budget post-apocalypse picture from the Netherlands has been solid if unspectacular. The limited resources have shown themselves in a world which almost entirely consists of running about sand dunes and light forest. The fight scenes have been grubbily realistic rather than impressive, with the kind of amateur flailing around with limited weaponry you’d probably actually see after armageddon has actually taken place. And the main focus of the plot has been the usual warlord type, Deacon (Bolt) who turns people into “supplicants” – drug-crazed pit-fighters for his personal amusement. Standard practice for a post-apocalyptic leader, really.

The main point of note is the titular heroine (Batelaan), who runs – entirely deliberately, I suspect – counter to expectations of what such a woman would be like. Molly is a scrawny teenage red-head, almost helpless without her glasses, and as noted above, hardly skilled in the martial arts – Imperator Furiosa, she is not, shall we say. She does have some assets: she’s not bad with a bow and arrow, and has a pet hawk. Most significantly, she has some kind of psychic abilities, that tend to come out when she’s upset. It’s these which bring her to the attention of Deacon, and to ensure she complies with his interests, the warlord kidnaps Bailey (de Paauw), the kid whom Molly has just befriended.

Which brings us to where this goes from “Not bad, works within its limits quite nicely, though not exactly original” to “This one’s a keeper”. Because Molly storms the off-shore stronghold where Deacon is keeping Bailey. In one 30-minute take. Okay, it’s clearly as much “one take” as Hitchcock’s Rope was – you can spot any number of moments where cuts have taken place. Yet, even attempting to put something like this together is extraordinarily ambitious for any low-budget film, and that the result works as well as it does, is simply amazing. The segments pitting Molly against Deacon’s lieutenant, Kimmy (Appelhof) and her mechanically-enhanced arm, are particularly well-done.

Some of the earlier scenes are shot similarly and work as appetizers; yet about eight minutes into the grand finale, I still suddenly went, “Hang on. When was the last cut?” If you’re like me, you’ll immediately be rewinding to watch it from the beginning. Elsewhere, the film is helped by crisp cinematography and an effective soundtrack, which sounds bigger budget than the movie. Perhaps wisely, the directors keep Batelaan’s performance largely driven by her actions rather than her dialogue. She fares considerably better than Bolt in this regard, and the ending is almost painfully abrupt.

All told though, and despite the over-familiarity of some aspects, the elements that are new and refreshing are really new and refreshing, from the non-fighting through to the awkwardness of the heroine. However, it’s the glorious mess of her final battle, which will stick in the mind of just about anyone who watches this. The trailer won’t prepare you for that level of awesomeness.

Dir: Colinda Bongers and Thijs Meuwese
Star: Julia Batelaan, Joos Bolt, Emma de Paauw, Annelies Appelhof