Tag: g

Good Morning, Verônica: season one

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★★★½
“Brazil nuts.”

Verônica Torres (Müller) is a second-generation cop in the Sao Paulo, Brazil police force, though her father left there under a cloud, and in circumstances which are unclear. Torres’s job is as a paper-pusher in the homicide division, but when the victim of a date-rapist kills herself right in front of Veronica, she decides to make a stand. She goes public, asking to hear from other victims, or any abused women, and is contacted by Janete Cruz (Morgado). Her common-law husband, Brandão (Moscovism), is very disturbed, a thoroughly nasty piece of work, and may even be a serial killer. However, he is also a member of the military police and has powerful friends, in a shadowy conspiracy which could have ties to Verônica ‘s father. She’s going to have to tread very carefully if she’s going to get the evidence she needs from Janete, to convict Brandão.

The first of the eight x 45-minute episodes was fairly humdrum, once you got past the shock of the opening suicide, The synopsis made it feel somewhat fringey in terms of the site, perhaps sounding not much more intense than a Hallmark TV movie. But the second part focused on Brandão. The gloves well and truly came off, as we discovered exactly the evil he can do. Rather than a dating site predator, it became clear there were bigger fish in need of frying. While the dating site plotline does proceed, it eventually (and this is a very good thing) takes a definite back-seat to the meat of the series, which is Veronica’s pursuit of Brandão. Fortunately, she is not alone, with help from both a forensic pathologist and the department’s tech guy. But there are those in the department who don’t want her to succeed – though whether purely out of professional jealousy, or for more sinister motives, is one of the issues the heroine has to untangle.

There are some very good performances at the heart of this, which faintly echoes Silence of the Lambs in its pursuit of a serial killer by a rookie investigator. To be honest, I probably found Brandão a more chilling and believable killer than Buffalo Bill (though not, of course, Hannibal Lecter!), with Verônica almost as sympathetic as Clarice Starling. You definitely need to stay the course, as I felt it got markedly better as it unfolded. The last couple of episodes have some shocking twists in the narrative; let’s just say, not everyone you expect to survive, will do so. I also appreciated how, at the end, Verônica is entirely forced to rely on her own abilities, with no help from anybody. It’s her vs. Brandão – again, echoing the end of Silence. The script does a particularly good job of tying up its loose ends, while leaving the door very much open to a second series. If that continues the steady improvement this showed over its course, I’m definitely looking forward to it.

Creator: Raphael Montes
Star: Tainá Müller, Camila Morgado, Eduardo Moscovism, Antônio Grassi
a.k.a. Bom Dia, Verônica

Gripped: Climbing the Killer Pillar

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★★★
“Climb every mountain…”

Newbie climber Rose (Maddox) is on her first trip to do some “real” climbing, rather than on a rock wall at her local gym. There, she meets and falls for the insanely rugged good-looking Bret (Lyman, who appears to have strayed right off the cover of a romance novel entitled “Love in the Surf”). After a couple of successfully, but relatively simple climbs, the pair head to take on something more challenging: the infamous “Killer pillar” of the title. Half-way up, a hand-hold used by Bret breaks, sending him tumbling down the cliff-face. Though the rope stops the fall from being fatal, he suffers a torn shoulder and head injury, leaving him unable to lead, and unable to descend. As the poster tagline says, “The only way down is up.” So, it falls on Rose, despite her lack of experience, to take over and forge a route up the near-sheer escarpment, that Bret will be able to navigate in her wake.

The mountaineering stuff here is excellent, and it seems that everyone involved was doing their own climbing. While for much of the time, I suspect they probably weren’t too far off the ground, there are a few shots that should come with a trigger warning for vertigo sufferers. Particular kudos to cinematographer John Garrett, who captures the stunning landscapes of the Sierra Nevada mountains in California – and, I suspect, did his share of climbing to get some of the angles. It just feels like legitimate climbing, in contrast to the Hollywood stuff seen in movies such as Cliffhanger. I note the presence in the supporting cast of notable real climbers, such as Jacki Florine, who in 2006 became the first woman to climb fourteen 14,000-foot peaks in California in 10 days. Another mountaineer, Natalie Duran, whom we recognized from her appearances on American Ninja Warrior, also has a supporting role as a jealous fellow climber.

The main problem is that the dramatic aspects don’t kick in until after the 50-minute mark, and it borders on the tedious to that point. Lovely scenery can only take you so far, when the romantic relationship at the movie’s heart is thoroughly unconvincing. We don’t need to see the banal process of them getting together, or the development of their interactions. This could, and probably should, have saved time by being an existing couple; Rose could still have been a novice climber, making her debut in the big outdoors. That would even have added a personal motivation to her heroics, rather than it being to save some hunk she met two days ago. Whatevs. They made the movie they wanted too, and it’s not on me to list ways to potential improve it! I’d say you can pay attention here when they clip on their gear, and safely ignore just about everything else.

Dir: Benjamin Galland
Star: Amanda Maddox, Kaiwi Lyman, Megan Hensley, Bryce Wissel

Getaway

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★★
“Witch, finder, general.”

This was likely not going to qualify for inclusion here, until a twist in the final 15 minutes. Up until that point, it had been a largely irritating saga, that was considerably more horror than action heroine – and not even good horror at that. I’m still significantly unconvinced about the quality, but must grudgingly admit, this was a twist which I did not particularly see coming (though there is a large clue dropped near the beginning). Three gal-pals, Tamara (Betham), Maddy (Taylor-Compton) and Brooke (Allbright) head for a weekend’s lakeside R&R. On the way, Tamara’s car runs out of fuel, and she encounters the local creeps, but eventually arrives, and joins the other two in scamming drinks out of horny guys.

However, the creeps are lurking, and a drugged beverage leads to Tamara waking, tied up in a farm outhouse. Turns out they’re not just creeps, but have a particular religious bent. They kidnap women, rape them, and then kill them so they can go to heaven and have “angel babies”, because… Look, they’re religious nutters, okay? Yet, that might be their fatal weakness, something Tamara can use against them, as she curses them, claiming to have occult powers. For if she is a servant of Satan, she’s hardly going to be capable of having those adorable little cherubs, is she? This is, actually, a potentially interesting aspect. However, it’s discarded in favour of the twist mentioned above, and even though it brought the film more into our wheel-house, I’m inclined to wish they hadn’t bothered.

The bigger problems start with the characterizations. The three girls are thinly-sketched at best: two are lesbians, because… well, presumably for the same reasons there is a pointless African-American sheriff’s deputy with a crush on Tamara. Not sure. None of the women seem very likeable, and indeed, I’d be hard pushed to tell you much about any of the trio as people: Maddy and Brooke barely serve any purpose, and the film might have worked better with Tamara operating as a lone wolf. The villains are equally shallow: the Wyatt Family from WWE exhibited more complexity and personality. And if you are hoping for gore or nudity, you are respectively going to be largely and completely disappointed.

It is one of those films where it reaches the end, and you find yourself wondering where things will go from there. Now that the little secret is out of the bag, any sequel would of necessity have to be completely different in its approach, yet that might prove to be more successful. However, it would have to work considerably harder to retain the viewer’s interest than the effort put in here. There were a number of occasions where I simply found myself no longer paying attention, and had to crank back the film a few minutes, just to be sure in my role as a conscientious film reviewer, that I had not missed anything. I hadn’t, and my suggestion is that you should probably skip the whole thing.

Dir: Lane Toran
Star: Jaclyn Betham, Scout Taylor-Compton, Landry Allbright, Lane Toran

The Golden Lady

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★★½
“The Gun With the Golden Girl”

This British film occupies an odd middle ground between Ian Fleming and Jackie Collins – with a garnish of… The Village People? Yeah, there were points where I genuinely wondered what I’d strayed into. The titular female is Julia Hemingway (Skriver, under the rather laughable screen name of “Christina World”, which seems more like a dubious theme-park), who is a corporate espionage specialist. She accepts a commission to infiltrate the bidding for oil rights in a Middle Eastern country, on behalf of one of the four participants.

With the auction about to take place in London, Hemingway brings in three agents (Danielle, Chadwick and Pavel), and tasks each with working on one of the other candidates – not least with their sexual wiles. However, as an increasing number of dead bodies start to show up, it becomes clear that this is not straightforward business. More than one government intelligence agency is highly interested in the outcome, and is prepared to stop at nothing to get the right outcome.

Director Larraz is best known for the cult horror movie Vampyres, and certainly seems out of his element here. There is probably a decent spy thriller in here – there’s a reason Desmond Llewellyn, the long-term Q in the Bond films, shows up in a minor role. Hemingway and her “angels” are all perfectly smart and capable too. Except, just when some momentum builds up, it keeps going off the rails, in a variety of directions. Some of those aren’t so bad: Ava Cadell, later to be a sexy radio host for Andy Sidaris, plays a modestly-priced hooker.

But then there’s the terrible soundtrack, book-ended with songs by The Three Degrees and (gack!) Charles Aznavour. And don’t get me started on the entirely gratuitous nightclub performances by Blonde On Blonde (a pop combo made up of two Page 3 models) and Hot Gossip, a “naughty” dance troupe, who at one point included future Mrs. Andrew Lloyd-Webber, Sarah Breitman, in their ranks. The kindest thing about them I can say is, there may be an alternate universe where these sequences made sense.

The action quotient is about as limited as you’d expect from a seventies British film, even if the ladies occasionally do get to engage in some brief fisticuffs of the limited kind. The best sequence is probably towards the end, when Dahlia (Danielle) is in a low-flying helicopter, blasting away at her target on the ground as they swoop back and forth; it looks rather risky, not least because it appears to be the actress herself present in the cockpit. I was also at least somewhat amused by the use of technology here. I imagine it was quite advanced for the late seventies, though they may want to recalibrate their database. Given the context of their work, I’m not certain that “nymphomanic” really deserves to be classified as a weakness for an agent. But generally, it’s boring stuff.

Dir: José Ramón Larraz
Star: Ina Skriver, Suzanne Danielle, June Chadwick, Anika Pavel

Girls, Guns and Blood

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★½
“It’s trying. So very trying…”

Maybe I’m getting too old for this kind of thing. Perhaps there was a time in my callow youth when I would have been grateful for the light-to-moderate amount of gratuitous nudity which this contains. Now, though? Its flaws overwhelm any such merits. Or maybe it was the fact that I watched this while dozed up to the eyeballs on DayQuil, and frankly, coughing up phlegm proved to be a more satisfactory pursuit.

It takes place in a supposed “brothel” run by Monique (Love). Quotes used advisedly, since it looks considerably more like someone’s house. A party of high-rollers are scheduled to be coming in, dropping thousands of dollars: though quite why they want to, escapes me, since the staff here are no more than “somewhat attractive.” You could probably catch better fish with a bottle of Jager in your average night-club on a Friday evening. Anyway, doubts about this aside, it turns out this “party” is actually a robbery, who loot the place after abusing the women. 

Needless to say, they’re not standing for that, so Kitty (Nguyen), Trix (Amber), Beretta (Valentien) and the rest of the girls ride out in hot pursuit, intent on recovering the ill-gotten gains and punishing the perpetrators. Fortunately, the gang have gone their separate ways, which makes it easier for the women to take them down: the old “Let’s split up!” mistake. But perhaps things aren’t quite as cut and dried as they appear. Maybe there’s a snake in the grass, who is quite happy to let her fellow hookers thin out the herd on her behalf, because the fewer slices of the pie there end up being, the better it will be for the survivors.

It’s all tiresomely amateur. Not least, the feeble attempts at comic relief, such as the gangster kingpin, Kaiser, whose droning complaints about lost money to a ski-mask clad ninja, go on way past what could remotely be considered entertaining. The repeated us of Six Million Dollar Man sound effects also should also have been strangled at birth. The pacing in general is awful, and the lead performances generally reflect the fact that most of the actresses are better known for adult work than their Broadway resumes. Nguyen and Love are, at least relatively credible, capable of walking and delivering lines at the same time. Some of the others? Not so much. Let’s leave it at that.

There were a couple of moments in the action which did actually work. Though I’m not sure how much sense they could be said to make, e.g. one of the women suddenly pulling a flaming sword out of… well, I’m not even going to hazard a guess at that. But when you’re left yearning for the understated subtleties of an Andy Sidaris film, there’s clearly something wrong. It might have succeeded better with alcohol, but that would likely not have combined well with my medications. Not a risk I was prepared to take, at least.

Dir: Thegin German + Robert Rowland
Star: Christine Nguyen, Britney Amber, Kleio Valentien, Rebecca Love

Grand Theft Auto Girls

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★★
“Preferred this when it was called Counterfeiting in Suburbia.”

Turns out that The Asylum are not the only company who makes mockbusters. As its alternate name makes clear, this Lifetime TVM is clearly a knock-off of the title mentioned above, down to the same, basic plot. Two teenage girls begin doing crime, largely for the excitement. A teacher becomes aware of their exploits and decides to blackmail them for his own benefit, by making them escalate their activities. This brings them increasingly under the scrutiny of both authorities and criminal elements, not to mention parental disapproval, eventually leading to a climax where all these aspects cross paths. As my review of Counterfeiting mentioned, it wasn’t even a particularly original idea there. As you can imagine, a second-generation copy is not an improvement, even if the idea of a knock-off of a movie about forgery possesses a certain irony. 

The main twist here is that instead of counterfeiting, the crime in question is car theft. Emily (Belkin) is being brought up by her mother, after her father died in a car accident, and is working to restore her late dad’s muscle car, a task which has helped give her certain car skills, including hot-wiring them. She has teamed up with classmate Max (Helt), to boost cars, purely for joy-riding purposes, but the pair decided to make a commercial endeavour out of it, and sell the vehicles to a local chop-shop they know. Their shop teacher, Mr. Curnow (Hynes) finds out about their work, and decides to use them to start stealing high-end cars, to provide seed money for his own business involving exotic sports vehicles. This doesn’t sit well with the chop-shop owner, the cops are beginning to close in, and worst of all, Emily’s Mom is growing increasingly suspicious. When she pays Curnow a visit at his home, she is held hostage to ensure Emily completes one final task, stealing a Hummer belonging to a well-connected local club owner.

This is so painfully bland, it should have been called Barbie and Friends Do Crimes. Admittedly, I was hoping for something like a female version of a Fast and the Furious movies. As I soon as I realized this was a Lifetime TVM, all hopes of that evaporated, but it could still have avoided having less edge than a rusty butter-knife. It shoehorns in a hot teenage boy delinquent (Manley) on whom Emily can crush, largely as a means of filling time, since he serves no real plot purpose. Even the car-stealing scenes, which could have generated tension, are feeble: witness in particular the example which consists largely of one girl starting intently into her handbag, waiting for a light to go green. Hitchcock is turning in his grave. It did manage to leave me yearning nostalgically for a film which only got 2½ stars, so that’s a new experience.

While I have already written more about this than it deserves, I just discovered there is still another TVM going down the same furrow: Smuggling in Suburbia. I’ll just leave its synopsis here. mostly as a warning that the possibilities appear, sadly, endless: “Joanie gets recruited to travel with other girls to exciting cities delivering camera lenses to photographers–and falls in love with Tucker, a partner in the courier business. When she searches the camera case she’s carrying and finds diamonds hidden inside a lens, Joanie realizes she is part of an illegal smuggling ring! She just needs to pay for her brother’s cancer surgery that would otherwise bankrupt the family.” Yeah, I’m good, thanks.

Dir: Jason Bourque
Star: Zoë Belkin, Samantha Helt, Tyler Hynes, Jake Manley
a.k.a. Hotwired in Suburbia

Gone (2012)

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★★½
“But not ENTIRELY forgotten…”

The life of Jill Conway (Seyfried) is slowly returning to somewhat normal, following her abduction by a serial killer in the Pacific Northwest.  She was held in a forest pit, and barely managed to escape with her life. However, the lack of physical evidence and a history of mental health problems, helped cause the authorities not to believe her story. When Jill’s sister Molly vanishes, she’s certain the same killer is responsible, and when the police again fail to take her seriously, begins investigating herself. But when the cops find out this former mental patient is packing heat, Jill becomes a fugitive herself.

This largely falls into the category of competently forgettable. There’s precious little here that will stick in the mind either way, for positive or negative reasons. Seyfried is admirably feisty, refusing to let anything interfere with her single-minded goal of rescuing sis. This persistence and raw guts displayed make her previous escape from the psycho’s clutches that necessary bit more plausible. Post-abduction, Jill comes over as a little unhinged, and you can see why the police might find it difficult to believe some of her claims. Yet this actually works to the benefit of her investigation, because when she starts waving her gun around, you can understand why whoever the business end is pointed at, would be concerned.

There’s just precious little in the way of surprises here. For instance, we never doubt she was telling the truth about her previous experience, or that the killer is indeed real, despite her willingness to lie to anyone and everyone in pursuit of Molly. More ambivalence about this – heck, make Jill the killer in the end! – would at least have separated this from the slew of other “Is her brain making it all up or not?” thrillers. Might also have saved the director from having to resort to one of the oldest cliches in the book, the Cat Attack Scare. The lack of any meaningful background on the killer is also a problem, leaving him a vague threat of no particular intent: why does he dig a pit in the woods for his victims? Any film like this is always going to be compared, probably unfavourably, to Silence of the Lambs. But Jim a.k.a. “Digger” here, is definitely no Buffalo Bill.

This motivation matters, because some of his actions – which, unfortunately, I can’t detail in a non-spoilerish way – are hard to make sense of. I get he’s annoyed that Jill escaped him. But his plan to lure her back into the woods at the dead of night… It offers little a well-chloroformed rag would not have been able to accomplish, with considerably less fuss. The movie did just about succeed in holding my interest, and the lack of any romantic element for the heroine was pleasant. However, you won’t have to have delved very deep into the genre, to find example of this kind of thing, done considerably better.

Dir: Heitor Dhalia
Star: Amanda Seyfried, Daniel Sunjata, Jennifer Carpenter, Sebastian Stan

Gone by Dawn + Gone by Dawn 2: Dead by Dusk

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Gone by Dawn ★★★½
Gone by Dawn 2: Dead by Dusk ★★½
“Stripped to kill.”

I decided I might as well combine these two into a single review. Having watched them back-to-back, even though made and set three years apart, they felt very much like the continuation of a single story about the same characters. The main one is Roxy (Mele), who is a dancer at a Wisconsin strip-club run by the sleazy Stag (Therrien), mostly as a money-laundering front for local organized crime. When he and his pal rape an employee, Alana (Pearce), Roxy along with the victim and another dancer, Crystal (Fierman), decide to take revenge by robbing Stag. That means getting into the safe in his office where the money is, and he’s not exactly going to give up the combination freely. Still, nothing that a piano-wire garrotte round the testicles can’t solve, surely? Except, as usual in this genre, the heist doesn’t go smoothly. Stag’s office quickly begins to resemble a mortuary, as unwelcome guests need to be handled.

This was, to be honest, better than I expected. There is, of course, the usual tension in grindhouse-style films about strippers – wanting them to be seen as more than T&A… while simultaneously being required to depict them as T&A. But the movie manages to strike a good balance here: while certainly not short on nudity, the lead actresses deliver performances which manage to make their characters feel like real people. The script also avoids people having to act like idiots too much, and the issue of the safe’s combination is solved in a way which is actually kinda clever. The low budget is a bit obvious in the limited locations and cast – we don’t get much outside of the club and an apartment – although in some ways, that works as much for the feature as against it. For example, it’s likely a factor in story-telling which certainly doesn’t hang around; maybe 65 minutes between opening and closing credits. And while there may be honour among thieves, there doesn’t appear to be much among strippers.

I didn’t think the sequel worked as well. While Roxy returns, she has been recast, being now played by Matheis – I’m not sure what happened to Mele. Still, I did laugh when one supporting character greets her with, “You look different!” Oddly, while the first film started with Roxy skipping town, the second sees her back, working at the same venue where she was involved in a multiple homicide. I know strippers are renowned for making poor decisions, but still… It turns out, having absconded with nine hundred grand of the mob’s money isn’t a good idea. They want it back, and to this end, have sent a trio of hired killers, named the Three Bears by Roxy. They’re prepared to do anything, up to and including both kidnapping and murder. But Roxy, along with Jesse (Radzion), a friend of Alana’s, and another dancer, Alura (Laventure), plots to turn the tables on the Three Bears, by robbing their boss.

Quite why the mob waited three years to take any action isn’t clear, and it’s just one of the problems with the story. Remember how I said the small-scale worked for the first film? That feels less true here, with the expanded script resulting in a bunch of loose ends and an unnecessarily stretched running-time of 107 minutes. For instance, we are introduced to a pair of cops, but they’re effectively unnecessary, and the same goes for a subplot which has Roxy visiting Stag in prison (one of the few players to return from the first film). Generally, I think I preferred Roxy 1.0 as well; I was just never quite convinced by Matheis in the role of an exotic dancer. The bits that work e.g. the ‘snake in the grass’ are mostly borrowed from its predecessor, though again, the movie does a good job with its characters.

Together, they make for a decent double-bill, though if you’re short on time, you might as well watch only the opener, since the sequel adds little in the way of development.  It’s perhaps telling that I must confess to getting distracted in the middle of GBD 2 by a lengthy article on location Club Pierre, one of the oldest strip-clubs in Edmonton. So, not Wisconsin at all. :) But it probably says something when a movie’s location is more interesting that the film.

Dir: Shaun Donnelly
Star: Gone by Dawn – Saleste Mele, Hannah Fierman, Katelyn Pearce, Jayson Therrien
Gone by Dawn 2: Dead by Dusk – Allana Matheis, Skylar Radzion, Ashley Laventure, Koreen Perry

Girl with a Gun

  By

★★★
“Taiwanese knock-off, unsurprisingly, proves not as good as the original”

Make no mistake, Ms. 45 is one of the absolute classics of the girls-with-guns genre. So, if you’re going to remake it – officially or, as in this case, not – you had better bring your A-game. It’s possible that Chen did indeed bring his A-game, as did Yin in the role of Liang Pi-Ho, the mute garment worker assaulted twice in one day, who kills her second attacker and begins an escalating spree of misandrist revenge. I haven’t seen enough of their work to be able to judge. But Chen is not Abel Ferrara, and Yin is definitely not Zoe Tamerlis. All of which renders this largely pointless. Although it still gets to ride the power of the original, and is sometimes interesting, when going its own route rather than being a shot-for-shot copy of its inspiration.

Mostly, it’s the latter, with the same nosy land-lady (Wong), and the victims including a guy who picks up Liang’s bag on the street, a sleazy photographer, and a gang of street thugs. The middle of these, for example, crashes back onto the backdrop in his studio in an almost identical way to the Ferrara version. Despite this Xerox approach, there just isn’t the same level of intensity in the central performance, and nor do you get the scuzzy, unwashed depiction of New York. It is worth noting that this Taiwanese production is set in Hong Kong – it has been suggested for censorship reasons? That would explain why the shots of Liang dismembering her first victim are shot in solarized negative. This version does also include a nightclub scene while an instrumental version of The Human League’s Love Action plays in the background, which was… unexpected.

Let’s discuss the other differences. It opens with news stories about attacks by the mentally ill, and there are wraparound segments which have our heroine receiving treatment in an asylum. This, along with her muteness being explained as a psychological reaction to the death of her parents in an accident, provides more “justification” for her actions in comparison to Ferrara’s version. The film includes coverage from the police side too, of the investigation into the trail of bodies she has left around the city. Interestingly, we don’t see the heroine dress up as a nun for the party at the end [perhaps because it’s not a Halloween event]. However, the female cop who is on the case does go undercover as a nun for one sequence.

Many of the changes are relatively small – tweaks, rather than significant changes. For instance, rather than the landlady having a dog, Liang herself has a cat. Though in a morbid twist, she feeds her kitty some of the remnants of her victim. The gang attack is preceded by a battle between two different groups, both of whom have tracked Liang to a deserted Hong Kong park: the winners get… Well, gunned down by her. There is, apparently, a more radical reworking “that spliced in new scenes featuring Caucasian actors and an inexplicable satanic cult,” and was sold in the West, for no good reason, as American Commando 5: Fury in Red, a.k.a. Crackdown Mission. Iconic exploito-schlock master Godfrey Ho allegedly had a hand in that cut-up, and it sounds loopy enough to make me want to see it.

There is one scene which is both genuinely new, and memorable. In her wanderings, Liang stumbles into a group doing a rendition of He’s Got the Whole World in his Hands, partially in sign-language, and is deeply affected by the mournful performance. [Really, it’s an upbeat tune, but this version sounds like it was done by Joy Division, such is the gloomy nature] I’m not sure quite why it’s there. Perhaps to demonstrate that Liang still possesses her humanity, and just needs it to be touched somehow? It’s a weird little scene, yet one that works, and shows that the film-makers here are not devoid of their own imagination. It’s a shame they didn’t choose to employ a bit more of it, taking their unauthorized remake down some other original directions.

Dir: Yao-Chi Chen
Star: Hsia Yin, Pauline Yuk-Wan Wong, Alan Tam, Lun Hua
a.k.a. Fury in Red

Guns Akimbo

  By

★★★★
“Don’t bring a spork to a gunfight!”

Harry Potter, this is not. If it’s difficult to separate Radcliffe from the hero of the movie franchise, this is the kind of film which should help considerably. He plays Miles, a computer programmer and online troll, who trolls the wrong people. Specifically, the ones who run Skizm, an increasingly popular and hyper-violent online streaming service, which broadcasts death-matches between contestants. For his sins, Miles is knocked out, and wakes to find himself with guns bolted to both hands. He is now Skizm’s latest contestant, going up against their reigning champion, Nix (Weaving). And to encourage him, the man who runs the game, Riktor (Dennehy), has kidnapped Miles’s intermittent girlfriend, Nova (Bordizzo). To survive, he’s going to need help from a most unusual source: Nix.

This is the kind of incessantly kinetic, brutal action film that you’ll probably either love or hate. I was pushed firmly into the latter company by Samara Weaving, who is a coke-snorting, chain-gun wielding, spiky package of undiluted and venomous awesome. While Miles is the nominal lead character, Nix was considerably more fun to watch, and also has the better character arc. For example, her actions have considerably better motivations, considering Miles is basically trolling for the LOLs. There’s plenty of her in action to appreciate too, pushing this out of the “supporting girl with gun” category into qualification. I haven’t yet seen Birds of Prey, but suspect Weaving would have been an admirable alternate to Margot Robbie.

I’m interested, if somewhat confused, about the moral message being sent here – or whether there is one at all. It’s both condemning the audience for violent entertainment… while, very clearly, feeding that same appetite. Any sense of intellectual superiority over the masses is similarly undercut by the extremely low-brow humour. Have you ever considered how hard it would be to go to the bathroom with your hands locked around firearms? Me neither. But with his writer’s cap on, Howden clearly has. Yet this does help insulate the film from suggestions of hypocrisy, its broken spiritual compass and disjointed one-liners a fitting match for the ADHD and morally bankrupt world it is depicting. Though the most implausible thing here, might be the way Miles’s fuzzy slippers stay on. I can’t even go down the stairs without mine making a bid for independence from my feet.

The action is almost non-stop, and the blood flows in rivers, to the point that it becomes almost a caricature of the more extreme end of video-gaming. It’s staged fairly well, though does occasionally topple over into the manic style of editing which is the bane of modern cinema. Things build towards the expected climax, in which Miles and Nix mount an all-out assault on Riktor’s headquarters, delivering one final shot of adrenaline-powered hyper-mayhem to your lizard brain. If not all the characters receive quite the fate you want, there’s enough here to make me believe Weaving has action heroine superstar potential.

Dir: Jason Lei Howden
Star: Daniel Radcliffe, Samara Weaving, Natasha Liu Bordizzo, Ned Dennehy