★½
“Hell is belles.”
Oh, dear. A misbegotten concept – Sweet Home Alabama crossed with Rocky – doubles down with shaky execution, and a non-stop parade of painfully obvious cliches in both characters and plot, to startlingly poor effect. As evidence of the first, imagine a film about a man, dumped by his girlfriend, who decides that beating her up is appropriate revenge. This would not exactly be anyone’s idea of comedy gold. But the makers here think that, simply by reversing the genders, it becomes so. They are very much mistaken. I believe I laughed once.
The heroine is southern belle Delilah (Harthcock), veteran of many a beauty pageant: we can tell, because virtually every scene sees her wearing a “Miss Mint Julep” sash or similar. Yeah, guess I’ll quote the master of sarcasm, Edmund Blackadder: “I thank God I wore my corset, because I think my sides have split.” Anyway, she is jilted at the altar by asshole fiancé Kelvin (Czerwonko), and decides to get back at him by challenging her ex, a former pugilist, to a boxing match. She goes to the local gym, convinces the sceptical Tandy (Cook) to train her, and…
Well, you can guess the rest. Trust me: the previous statement isn’t critical hyperbole. You could literally write down ten plot points that have been done to death in this kind of film, and I’d wager at least seven of them would be delivered here. Family opposition? Check. Delilah falls for Tandy? Check. Befriends the gym’s tough girl, Slice (Pierre)? Check. Heart-warming finale? Double-check. That this manages to take an hour and fifty-one minutes to get there, however, is testament to some impressively meandering story-telling. It likely doesn’t help that you can see the eventual destination coming, from a very long way off.
The budget here was reportedly $15,000, and it shows. This is especially true in the department which is the bête noire of low-budget film-making, audio. It’s echoey in one scene, muffled in the next, and the incidental music score often cuts abruptly at the join, making the transitions more abrupt instead of smooth. It’s some credit that Harthcock’s performance manages to overcome these problems, at least to some degree, and the perky Delilah is generally the best thing the film has to offer [the sole time I laughed, as mentioned above, was when she spat out a taunt, along the lines of “Why aren’t you married yet? Wasn’t your brother available?”]
However, it’s a performance which sticks out like a sore thumb when put beside the rest of the cast, with Tandy in particular so understated, he should be checked for a pulse. The vast bulk of the attempts at comedy fall painfully flat, the romance between the two leads is sadly lacking in chemistry, and the efforts at portraying the boxing and Delilah’s training are 95% unsuccessful. There are any number of potentially interesting directions this could have gone: instead, the script sticks to a painfully well-travelled path, and ends up going down for the count.
Dir: Sean Riley
Star: Jessica Harthcock, Noah Cook, Ryan Czerwonko, Donnie Pierre