★½
“This hit is a miss.”
Made on a shoestring in Ireland, the nicest thing you can say is probably, this doesn’t look as cheap as it was. If only you could say the same for the script, which seems to be trying to be Guy Ritchie, only to end up nearer to Guy Fieri. It’s not a terrible idea, if rather stretching belief. Katelin Ballantine (Doherty) is a film producer, trying to raise funds for her latest movie. To that end, she is hanging out, unwillingly, with sleazeball businessman, Felim Shaw. What she doesn’t know, is he is deep in debt to local mob-boss Edmund Murren (Fleming). He kidnaps them both, forces Katelin to kill her potential investor, then threatens her family to make her continue in her new career as his assassin, alongside former friend and now Murren associate, Henry Furey (Kealy).
Two years later, she’s splitting time between that and her ongoing film production work. But her underworld identity becomes known to Murren’s rivals, and she is cut loose as a liability. With Henry her only ally, and the police now also closing in, Katelin has to try and survive, keep her family safe and stay out of the authorities’ hands. Only, none of this manages to mesh into a coherent, or even interesting, whole. For example, the film producer angle seems to exist purely for the purpose of the title, and doesn’t add anything of note to the main story. Given this set-up, it might have made sense had it been filmed in Los Angeles, or better yet, Hong Kong, where the overlap between the movie industry and organized crime is well-known. Dublin? Not so much.
As mentioned, I didn’t hate the idea. We used to know someone who… let’s just say, had a not dissimilar, sharp divergence between their day job and main source of income. But the execution here is just terrible, with the makers unable to decide what kind of tone they are aiming for, and even less ability to deliver it. It crams too many characters in, leaving none of them able to make an impact; I simply did not care what happened to anybody. Even Katelin is a botched heroine, in part because the movie skips entirely over the two years where she goes from sniveling wreck, whimpering by the side of the grave she has just dug, to a hard-nosed killer.
I suspect it either needed to give us that transition, or begin with the latter and perhaps fill in the back-story down the pipe. Instead, the film basically ignores what is arguably the most interesting element, in favour of murky betrayal and shenanigans among the Irish underworld. There’s little or nothing here we haven’t seen before, and almost always done better to boot. The action is nothing to write home about either, leaving my attention and interest to peak, more or less at an admittedly stylish opening credit sequence.
Dir: Kevin de la Isla O’Neill
Star: Michelle Doherty, Neill Fleming, Fergus Kealy, Susan Barrett


I came into this somewhat braced, given its 3.0 IMDb rating, and reviews which tended to be scathing e.g. proclaiming “This May Be The WORST Movie I’ve Ever Seen!” While it’s clearly not
June Williamson (Guillot) is an out-of-work actress, who just broke up with her boyfriend, Oliver (Vernet), and is behind on the rent to her creepy landlord. An unexpected lifeline arrives in the shape of a very well paid gig, house-sitting a large house, deep in the countryside. Things get annoying when Oliver and his asshole pal Marcel (Thevenoud) show up. They get worse when Oliver admits they had an accident on the way, and there’s a body in the car boot. A stare of “terrible” is reached when the body vanishes. And we reach peak awful, when the house comes under siege from Wolfströeme (Bary) and his heavily-armed gang of mercy, who are looking for…
I do admire a film which does not hang about, and this certainly qualifies. We begin with Ava Bravo (del Castillo) removing a hood to find herself in a very remote, snowbound mountain cabin. A cassette player nearby has a message. She has been abducted by Buddy King (Blucas), a millionaire with a fondness for kidnapping trauma survivors and hunting them through the wilderness. There’s a snowmobile parked five miles North, if she can make it across the winter terrain there. To make it fairer, Buddy has only three bullets for his gun. Oh, and he’s going to be coming up from the basement in ten seconds. Safe to say, this is the kind of start that grabbed my attention.
★★★½
Over in my non-GWG life, I’ve been on
This version of the world is more or less identical to our own. Except, several hundred years ago, there was a catastrophe in which massive dragons rampaged around, with humans being collateral damage. A secret society called the Earthbound managed to end the thread, partly through the invention of the Spell Web – basically, an Internet for magic users. Now, the Earthbound and a secret government organization, the Supernatural Intelligence Group, operate to keep a largely oblivious population in the dark. Though everyone knows dragons are extinct… aren’t they?
This gets off to an impressive and intriguing start. Cora Fisher (Pribilski) has a perfectly normal life. Then, she’s involved in a car crash. The next thing she knows, she wakes up in a hospital bed. Oh, to which she is handcuffed. Before she can come to terms with that, she is informed that ten years have passed. And completing the triple-whammy, Texas Ranger Jim Krueger (Llorens) enters, and tells Cora he’s going to make sure she gets the death penalty for the murders she committed. It’s safe to say, the movie has successfully gained my attention by this point. Guided by mysterious cellphone texts, Cora escapes the hotel and goes on the run, seeking to find out the truth about what happened.
I guess this shows that the concept of the “mockbuster” is not something invented by The Asylum. This came out in 1978, the year after 