★★½
“Women of Glow, not Women of GLOW…”
This would be a creditable little film, if the makers could ever be bothered to finish it. Yeah, it ends in what is supposed, I presume, to be some kind of cliffhanger. But it botches the landing badly, first by leaping forward two weeks instead of showing us the climax to which things have been leading up. Then, it just… ends, without resolution in any of the major plot threads. It’s a shame, because to that point, if doing nothing particularly new, this is competent in its execution, and I’ve seen a lot worse. It gets the basics right, with a half-decent story and characters: in the urban genre, this is sadly less common than you would hope.
It takes place in Atlanta, where the fictional Glow Street is the centre of the drug trade, with various factions fighting for control, with their battles spilling over into the neighbourhood, where innocent bystanders sometimes bear the brunt. After a brief “Tsk-tsk” about this in a detective’s speech at the beginning, however, morality is hard to find here. Instead, we’re plunged into the activities of Jahdai (Lynn) and her colleagues, who initially act as enforcers for Troy. But after they disobey a direct order from him, in order to take care of some personal business, they are no longer employed. In need of cash to meet their own liabilities, they decide to rob a stash house. Naturally, this doesn’t go as planned.
The main thing this probably has going for it is Lynn. She has some spectacular skin art, so looks the part, and has the attitude to match. Jahdai is certainly not somebody I would want to cross, yet manages to become someone who is not one-dimensional (another common problem in this sub-genre). Indeed, there are a slew of subplots, including a mother with lung cancer, a father who just got out of jail, and so on. It probably takes about forty minutes for the main story – the stash-house robbery, and subsequent betrayal – to kick in. Then there’s Trav (Stagg), the brother of someone killed in an earlier incident, who is out for revenge on Jahdai, largely what leads to the non-ending discussed above.
Escobar does an acceptable job of keeping the various threads coherent, and there’s no shortage of enthusiastic carnage. On the downside, there’s far too much unconvincing CGI blood, while often leaves the film looking like a Grand Theft Auto side-mission. All told, however, I was kept reasonably entertained and engaged, and it definitely looks and sounds like a professional work, rather than shot on somebody’s phone. Until things fall apart at the end, I would have been interested in seeing subsequent tales from this hood. But the writers’ inability to finish the job, leave me wary that further entries might end up pulling a similar trick. Tell me a complete story, dammit – if it’s good enough, I don’t need tricks to drag me back for more.
Dir: Vincent Escobar
Star: Destinee Lynn, Kierra Shiday, Caleb Stagg, Natasha Eli Pearson