★★½
“a.k.a. We’ve Got a Drone And We’re Gonna Use It”
This is a very cunning title. For when you Google “Negative film review”, all you get are a lot of articles about Bright. Hohoho. [In five years time, people will probably have to Google “Bright” to understand this reference] Actually, it refers to a photographic negative, casually taken by Rodney (Roché) in the park. What he doesn’t realize at the time, is that he has accidentally captured the face of Natalie (Winter), a former MI-5 agent who is on the run. She turns up on his doorstep, demanding he turn over the photo to her, but before she can leave, the two Colombian assassins after her, also show up, and she has no choice but to take (the thoroughly confused and largely unwilling) Rodney with her. Together, they head for Phoenix and a safe house owned by Natalie’s former associate, Hollis (Quaterman), with the Colombians in pursuit.
First things first. I was startled to learn some people apparently still take pictures on film requiring an actual darkroom to develop it: personally, this left the movie already feeling like a throwback to the eighties, about as out of time as Phone Booth is now. [References to The Honeymooners and I Love Lucy don’t exactly help there] Moving past that, it all feels rather too understated. Apart from some blood-spatter, we don’t get any real evidence of Natalie’s qualifications as a bad-ass until an hour into the movie – she’s more about evasion than confrontation, save for a drunk guy at a motel. This may have been a function of a relatively small budget – only $100K, and to the credit of Caldwell and its crew, the overall look generally doesn’t show it. [There are some interesting interviews with the director online, explaining how this was possible. They’re worth a read, since he seems a smart guy]
Resources may also explain why it’s pretty dialogue-heavy: two people in a car is about as cheap as it gets. Though the dialogue isn’t terrible, it just isn’t good enough to carry the film, which it needs to do. As the tag-line above suggests, you could play a drinking game based on the number of drone shots: it got the the point where, on more than one occasion, we accurately predicted the next such showing up. And the “Phoenix” the film depicts… Well, let’s just say, there were rather too many palm trees, and not enough cacti for that aspect to ring true. It offers little or no sense of place, with generic suburbia and desert, which feel like they could be anywhere West of the Rockies.
Everything progresses much as you’d expect, if you’ve seen this kind of film before, eventually reaching the expected gun-battle against the Colombians. This unfolds at night, and it’s tough to figure out what exactly is going on. There’s likely a bigger problem though: by the time you reach it, I still hadn’t quite been given a real reason to care. While I’d like to see more from Winter (the story of how her character got to this point, might potentially have been more interesting than the one actually told), the film likely works better as a technical exercise than an emotional experience.
Dir: Joshua Caldwell
Star: Katia Winter, Sebastian Roché, Simon Quarterman