Tag: mother

Night Raiders

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★★½
“Night of the Living Deads”

This rather gloomy slice of social science-fiction seems to take place in a post-apocalyptic version of Canada, albeit a fairly low-key apocalypse. It seems to have led to a rigidly class-based system, with a sharp division between “citizens” and the rest. That leaves the indigenous population on the outside, scrabbling hard to survive and avoid having their kids “re-educated” in military-style academies. [This pointedly echoes something similar which actually took place as recently as the sixties] To avoid being separated, Niska (Tailfeathers) and her daughter Waseese (Letexier-Hart) live off the grid in the countryside. However, after Waseese suffers an accident, they have to seek medical attention back in the city, bringing them to the attention of the authorities.

This ends in Waseese being taken away, and Niska forming a rather uneasy alliance with a local group of native Canadians, who are operating in resistance to the authorities. They have their own encampment, and one of their shamen (shawomen, I guess) had a dream which appears to be a prophecy about a saviour coming from the North. Which seems to fit Niska, much to her discomfort. She reluctantly agrees to help take a group of indigenous children to a supposed “safe haven”, if the group assists her in breaking Waseese out of the academy. Though will her daughter be willing to leave after the relentless brainwashing, telling Waseese her mother abandoned her? Then there’s the imminently looming removal – or worse – of the encampment.

It’s all very earnest, glum and comes up rather short as entertainment. I’m sure the film-makers would respond that entertainment isn’t the point, but if you’re using your movie as a parable, it helps get the message across if people are engaged. We’ve seen this kind of crypto-fascist villain state too often before (most obviously in The Hunger Games), and writer-director Goulet doesn’t bring much new to the table. As bad guys, they’re fairly milquetoast. Indeed, when someone says “Cree can’t take care of their own families”, I was kinda forced to think, “You might have a point,” given Waseese was tramping round the woods and living in an abandoned school bus when we first meet her. A call to CPS hardly seems unmerited.

The best thing about this is the look of the film, which does a very good job capturing the fall of civilization as we know it. While it’s never clear exactly what happened to cause this, what’s left is largely a blasted wasteland of badly-damaged buildings, whose inhabitants are clinging on by their fingertips. However, few of the characters living in this setting are given much in the way of depth, and the plot does things like throw in a virus epidemic which goes nowhere, because it’s 2021 and every self-respecting dystopia needs one. The finale teeters over into the fatuous, with Waseese suddenly being able to mind-control a flock of flying government drones. I’ll admit, I did not see that coming.

Dir: Danis Goulet
Star: Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers, Brooklyn Letexier-Hart, Alex Tarrant, Amanda Plummer

The Baztan Trilogy

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The Baztan trilogy consists of three movies, based on the novels by Dolores Redondo. The setting for these is a small area in the Basque country of Spain, not far from the border with France. Much like the small-town English villages such as Miss Marple’s St. Mary Mead, or Death in Paradise‘s Honoré, the murder rate in this charming and picturesque area appears to rival that of a South American war-zone. I guess you can describe the series as Español negro, being a Mediterranean-based version of Nordic noir. Like those, you have a detective with a troubled past, a history that frequently seeps into her current life, They are investigating crimes resulting from what’s unquestionably the darker side of human nature, and the results are uncomfortably close to home.

In this trilogy, the heroine is Amaia Salazar, a former resident of the region who left under circumstances best described as murky. She joined the police force, rising through the ranks and going through a successful secondment to the FBI, where she distinguished herself. Amaia is now back in Spain, with her American artist husband, James. But, as ever in this kind of thing, the pull of her past is strong. She finds herself coming back to the Baztan region in which she grew up. There, the ghosts of history are lurking and ready to pose a challenge – perhaps equal to that of solving the brutal murders which are the reason for her return.

The trilogy includes the books El guardián invisible (The Invisible Guardian), Legado en los huesos (The Legacy of the Bones) and Ofrenda a la tormenta (Offering to the Storm). From 2017 through 2020, the books were made into three movies by Atresmedia Cine and its partners. Five years after the last of the books was published, Redondo wrote a prequel, La cara norte del corazón (The North Face of the Heart), describing Amaia’s youth and her time with the FBI in America. All four novels were optioned to Heyday Films for American adaptations in October 2021, but there has been almost no news since the original announcement. Still, with the Spanish movies all available on Netflix, the need for any English-language versions is questionable in my opinion. Such things rarely improve on, or even equal, the originals.

Hence, below you’ll find reviews of the three Spanish movies in order. Note: I haven’t read the books, so there will be no further discussion of them, or comparison to the films.

The Invisible Guardian

★★★½
“It’s never sunny in Baztan.”

I’ve traveled a fair bit around Spain and Mediterranean Europe in my time, and the weather was never as unremittingly grim as its depicted here. Things seem to unfold in a permanent downpour. Seriously: Chris and I pretty much were turning it into a drinking game by the end: take a swig every time a scene takes place in the rain. Only concern for the health of our livers prevented us. Googling tells me Baztan is fairly wet: around 55 inches a year. But it felt like most of that arrived during the 129 minute running-time of this film. I suspect David Fincher and Se7en have a lot to answer for, with rain = dark and foreboding atmosphere.

There’s certainly no shortage of that here, even setting meteorological considerations aside. It begins with the discovery of a young girl’s corpse by a river, stripped naked except for a local cake placed on her crotch. Pamplona detective Amaia Salazar (Etura) makes the connection to a previous murder and is sent to Baztan to take over the case. It’s the town where she grew up, and she still has family there. Though relations are still strained with her sister Flora (Mínguez), who runs a bakery in the town. She feels Amaia abandoned the family by “running off” to the United States. It’s not long before we discover their mother had issues, physically abusing Amaia as a child.

However, the main focus is the murders, with further victims turning up, all young girls whose bodies are posed in the same, ritualistic way. The investigation reveals these may be the latest in a series of killings going back fourteen years, which appear to be some kind of moral crusade by the perpetrator. Amaia gets into trouble with her colleagues, because one of the victims was having an affair with her brother-in-law, and she also conceals evidence connecting Flora’s bakery to the cake. She ends up being replaced on the case by Montés (Orella). If you think that’s going to stop Amaia, you clearly haven’t seen enough of this genre.

It does feel very much like the film could be relocated to the Scandinavian forests with very little trouble. There is some specifically local colour in the form of the “Basajaun”, a legendary – or perhaps not – creature, reputed to roam the woods. I suspect its going to play a larger part in the subsequent movies: while this does tidy up the main case, there are a number of loose ends, such as a cave containing a lot more remains. Etura does a good job of handling both the personal drama and the police elements: you may not agree with some of the choices, yet you can see why she made them. Amaia has been through hell, and that she still made something of her life is an admirable trait. A solid enough opening, which even lured Chris off her phone.

Dir: Fernando González Molina
Star: Marta Etura, Elvira Mínguez, Carlos Librado “Nene”, Francesc Orella

The Legacy of the Bones

★★★★
“Skeletons in the closet”

We jump ahead about a year for the second installment. Amaia Salazar (Etura) has now had the baby she announced she was expecting during the first film, and is adjusting to the need for balance between her career and motherhood, with her husband, James. After completing her maternity leave, she returns to work, and is put on a case of church desecration with cult undertones, at the request of the enigmatic Fr. Sarasola (Arias). This is tied to the Cagots, a historically persecuted group native to the region. Simultaneously, there is an ongoing string of murderers committing suicide, each leaving behind a one-word message: “Tartalo”. It’s a reference to a baby-eating giant from Basque mythology, and seems to be linked to the cave of remains found in the previous film.

Both cases take a deeply-personal turn, reflecting the family of Amaia’s long-standing association with the area. When tested for DNA, the bones left on the church altar are a match for her genetics, and her abusive mother Rosario (Sánchez), now kept in a psychiatric facility, scrawls “Taratalo” on the floor of the room in blood, after attacking an orderly.  Amaia is forced to uncover some very unpleasant truths about the history of her family – and, indeed, the way the region in general dealt with children perceived as unwanted or problematic. Her newborn son becomes part of the scenario as it unfolds, pushing the heroine close to the edge, as she picks her way towards solving the crimes of both the past and present.

This goes into some thoroughly dark places, building on the heavy atmosphere set up in the previous movie. For example, we already knew that Rosario is dangerous, and a patently unfit mother. But what we see her do in this film, goes beyond the mere abuse we previously saw. It’s fortunate that Amaia has a strong support network elsewhere in her family, such as Aunt Tía (Aixpuru), who can offer advice and assistance to help keep her niece on the relatively straight and narrow. To be honest, the revelations here would shake anyone to their core, and it’s testament to the heroine’s strength of character, that she is still able to function as a police detective, while the foundations of her life are being pulled out from under her.

The script does a very good job of keeping the multiple plot-threads functioning, moving each forward in turn, as information regarding the situation is discovered. While avoiding spoilers, it is a little hard to believe Amaia would be so in the dark about the situation in regard to her own family: you’d think Tia might have said something? However, there is an almost relentless grimness of tone here – and a lot more rain as well, with a flooded town being integral to the plot – which pulled me in with the inevitability of a rip tide. It might just about work as a standalone entity, yet you will certainly get more out of this, if you’ve seen the first movie and know where it’s coming from.

Dir: Fernando González Molina
Star: Marta Etura, Itziar Aizpuru, Imanol Arias, Susi Sánchez

Offering to the Storm

★★
“Gale force disappointment.”

Oh, dear. I think it’s probably been a very long while since I’ve been so underwhelmed by the finale of a trilogy. All the pieces were in place, after the first two entries, for a grandstand finish to the series. But the script basically fumbles things in every conceivable way, pushing to the front elements that you really don’t care about, while all but discarding things that seemed of crucial importance. There is an effort to tie everything together, with the various crimes from its predecessors being linked into an occult conspiracy in which members of a Satanic circle sacrifice baby girls, and receive worldly power in exchange. This aspect is okay, Amaia having to go up against a group whose power is embedded at the highest levels of local society. The creepiest element is perhaps that the sacrifices seem to work, though nobody seems too bothered about this. 

Unfortunately, it doesn’t gel well with the elements carried forward from the first two movies, and a lot of the elements that should be shocking or disturbing simple are not. The worst example is the identity of the cult’s “inside man”, which is so painfully obvious, you may find yourself yelling at the screen, and Amaia as she ploughs on with her investigation, completely oblivious to the threat. Little less blatant is the plot thread where husband James (Northover) is going back to America because his father is ill. We’ve seen enough in this genre to know that there is no possible way Amaia is going to end up accompanying him, regardless of how much she promises she will. The film seems convinced it is the first ever to use this device, to demonstrate how its dedicated, troubled detective has her priorities skewed. 

This somewhat ties into the whole fidelity subplot, which did nothing except make us (Chris especially) lose empathy for the lead character. In this installment, Amaia just does not seem as “heroic” as previously. I get that the pressure on her is building. But I would have preferred it to lean into the saying, “Hard times breed strong women.” There’s just too many occasions on which she breaks down and starts sobbing instead. Some of it may be justified: there’s the uncertainty about the fate of her mother, for example, who was last seen plunging into a flood-swollen mountain river. This is resolved. In about the least satisfactory way possible. At least it is addressed. Remember the “Basajaun”? Because the makers here clearly did not.

At 139 minutes, this is the longest of the trilogy, and you’ll be forgiven if you think it feels that way too. Rather than being led by the film, all too often we found ourselves ahead of it, and then having to wait for the plot and characters to catch up with what we had already figured out. We also ended up rolling our eyes heavily at some of the plot developments, such as the mother of a sacrificed baby acquiring some dynamite and using it to blow open the vault where her child is buried. Wait, what? It’s a shame, that after two films which did so much right, the third does goes wrong in so many different ways.

Dir: Fernando González Molina
Star: Marta Etura, Leonardo Sbaraglia, Carlos Librado “Nene”, Benn Northover

Martingale

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★★½
“Double or – more likely – nothing.”

It’s probably symptomatic of… something, that the film’s title is never explained. With the main character working in a casino, I presume it’s a reference to the Martingale betting system, where you basically double your bet after every loss. It guarantees a profit – unless you hit such a long losing streak you run out of money entirely. Its relevance here is uncertain, and I doubt most viewers would know what a martingale is either. But then, the film is very good at not explaining stuff. Another example would be, what the scam is supposed to be with Andi (Sullivan) collecting left-behind cash-out casino slips and handing them to a collaborator, Whit (Melikhov). These are for trivial amounts, so why bother?

When not bilking her employer out of pocket change, Andi’s main obsession is investigating the death of her daughter, a year previously. She had overdosed in a drug house, but the police were unable to press charges on anyone. Andi is not put off, and is intent on finding the boy whom she blames for her child’s death, and making him suffer in a similar way. Her investigation proceeds with the increasingly reluctant help of local private eye Levi (Adkins), and brings her up against the powerful and evil Harland (Shockley). Turns out, it was his son Robby who was with Andi’s daughter. Neither parent is prepared to back down and give up on their offspring, so eventually, something will have to give.

The tagline on the release poster was changed to “Revenge is a deadly gamble,” which does at least tie in with the title. But the original one of “Revenge is a real mess,” might be more accurate, with Andi stumbling into increasing trouble, and refusing to accept the very sensible advice, just to let it go. While her persistence is the heroine’s most admirable quality, the film itself is also a real mess in some aspects, with plotting which is often as obtuse as its title. While Harland does project a certain menace as the villain, I found it hard to take anyone seriously as a bad guy, when he looks like James May out of Top Gear. 

Nowhere is the vagueness more apparent than at the end. There’s a knock at the door and… That’s it. We never learn who it is. The makers were clearly going for ambiguity, but if you hated how The Sopranos ended, this might well have you lobbing pets, living-room furniture or small children through your television set. If the script leaves plenty to be desired, at least the performances are decent, and a bit like in Adrenaline, you do get a sense of turning over a societal rock, and seeing the less than pleasant results beneath. As a heroine’s journey, it’s a trip into the underworld, though I would be hard pushed to tell you how Andi was changed by her experience. I certainly know I was not.

Dir: Jeremy Berg
Star: Kelly Sullivan, William Shockley, Jason Adkins, Konstantin Melikhov

Adrenaline

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★★
“Taking on organ-ized crime.”

You know you’re in for a shaky experience when the film can’t even spell its own title right. That proves a fairly accurate assessment of the overall experience: while not without its merits, these are outweighed by the negatives in the final analysis. The heroine is Victoria Travers (Payne), an FBI agent on holiday with her family in Romania, when she spots a fugitive from justice, John Slater (Mandylor). She attempts to extract him over the border, to where he can be extradited, but while that takes place, her husband is killed, and her daughter snatched by an organ harvesting ring, run by Ivan Raj (Saini). Suddenly, Slater with his local knowledge, is the only hope of Victoria rescuing her child.

It’s all very basic and quite linear. The plot feels almost like it might have been lifted from a video-game, as the odd couple roam Bucharest, working their way up the criminal organization. with the occasional side quest such as rescuing another kidnapped child, freeing hookers, etc.There’s an NPC, in the form of hacker Tony (Hauck), who provides helpful information whenever Victoria and John appear to be at a dead end. The low-budget nature does work for the film, in that there’s an overall scuzzy feel to proceedings which is appropriate, and the location enhances this. It feels like the kind of place where organ harvesting would take place, though I suspect any such organization would, in reality, be more ruthless – and considerably more competent, to be frank.

Mandylor helps elevate proceedings, as he usually does: nice that his brother, Costas, also appears in this, playing Victoria’s long-suffering boss. Shame the Mandylors don’t get any scenes together. Payne is just about adequate as the relentless mother, and much less convincing as an FBI agent. However, she’s still better than certain members of the supporting cast. Some don’t even appear to have English as a second language, but there are others who can’t lean on that excuse.  The action is intermittent, albeit not badly-staged in general. We could have done with more, perhaps in lieu of the interminable scenes of our heroine and hero driving around town, talking to people on the telephone or, occasionally for variety, driving around town while talking to people on the telephone.

I wobbled back and forth for much of this between 2 and 2½ stars. While low-budget, often obviously, it keeps moving forward, and there’s something to be said for simplicity, rather than burdening the viewer with unnecessary subplots. It’s never boring, over its seventy-five minute duration. But the ending is particularly weak, falling well short of providing Constance with an opportunity to face off against a final boss, something the movie undeniably needs. This passed the time adequately, yet I cannot say I was ever engaged, and there’s not enough to make me look into other work by Cerchi, whose talents appear limited to making sure the image is mostly in focus.

Dir: Massimiliano Cerchi
Star: Constance Payne, Louis Mandylor, Adam Saini, Alexander Hauck 

Special Delivery

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★★½
“Good only in car parts.”

Based on the trailer, I was hoping for something like a Korean version of The Transporter. It seemed to promise this, with Jang Eun-ha (Park) playing a courier for Baekgang Industries, a company who will transport things – mostly people, it appears – from Point A to Point B, when regular delivery methods are not possible. For example, because the passenger in question is being chased by enemies, and needs to make a quick exit from the country before he’s found. Her latest mission involves baseball pitcher Kim Doo-shik, who has blown the whistle on a match-fixing scandal, so needs to escape before those behind it get hold of him and young son Kim Seo-won (Jung).

So far, so sprightly, especially after an enthralling early sequence which showcases Eun-ha’s mad driving skills in avoiding pursuers through the narrow streets of Busan. However, the attempted pick-up of Kim Sr. goes badly awry, as he’s being chased by Jo Kyung-pil (Song). Jo is a corrupt cop who is also behind the gambling ring involved in the match-fixing. Eun-ha ends up in possession of Seo-won, and… Hang on, didn’t we write about three different versions of this story in October 2022? Yeah, for much of the rest of the film is basically another take on Gloria. Brash, beer-drinking Eun-ha is lumbered with a kid whom she cannot initially stand, yet inevitably, comes to care for Seo-won over the remaining course of the film.

Now, this isn’t all that different from The Transporter, where Jason Statham was also lumbered with an unwanted human package, in his case Shu Qi. However, there, it was the jumping off point for some cool and generally entertaining action, e.g. the classic garage fight, involving a well-oiled Statham. Here, not nearly so much, even though Jo is keen to get hold of the kid, who has a computer dongle which is key to the recovery of $30 million. While this could have been the source of multiple exciting car-chases – and as the opening shows, technically, the makers were more than capable – it feels as if director Park is more interested in how suddenly enforced maternal responsibility changes his heroine. I can’t say I’m with him there.

The concept can work, but seems incredibly trite here, and doesn’t help matters that Seo-won is a very generic child, with little personality compared, say, to Newt in Aliens, or Mathilda in The Professional. Consequently, Eun-ha’s decision not to drop the child off at the nearest police-station seems contrived for plot purposes, rather than resulting from a natural release of suppressed nurturing emotions. It’s well-enough assembled that it never becomes unwatchable, yet proceedings remain just that: assembled. It’s not without merit, since both protagonist and antagonist make for interesting characters. But it the end, Chris described it as “cute,” and that’s borderline damning with faint praise in her vocabulary – one step above “interesting.” I can’t honestly say she was wrong in her assessment.

Dir: Park Dae-min
Star: Park So-dam, Song Sae-byeok, Kim Eui-sung, Jung Hyeon-jun

Hunt Her, Kill Her

  By

★★★
“Tabling the argument.”

This is fairly sparse, unfolding entirely in the single location of a furniture factory, over the course of a single night. The central character is Karen (Terrazzino), a single mother who has just taken on the job of a cleaner and overnight security guard at the premises, in order to provide for her young daughter, who is ill on the night Karen has to start work. These issues quickly pale into insignificance – though not irrelevance – when a group of masked men enter the building, looking to hunt down and kill her. With the doors chained from the outside and the phone lines cut, Karen is entirely on her own against the bigger and stronger, but fortunately not smarter, intruders.

That’s basically it, and this is definitely not one if you’re looking for complex themes or nuanced characters. It’s straightforward survival horror, with the first half closer to stalk ‘n’ slash territory, consisting mostly of Karen being chased around the labyrinthine building, hiding out and being discovered. Things do become more action-oriented the deeper we get into things. There is a certain element of fortune in the ways she defeats some of her opponents, although this is probably necessary given the size disparity, and there’s a chaotic messiness to them which is effective. The one which stands out is the death by toilet plunger (no, the other end), which is drawn out to the point where it becomes almost blackly humourous.

That said, I did still roll my eyes at some elements, most obviously when Karen disguises herself as one of the predators. It’s an unnecessary push of believability, which would have been best forgotten. On the other hand, it is nice that the damage isn’t all one way. By the time Karen gets down to the final assailant (Oakley), she’s certainly far from uninjured, and this only escalates during their battle. If you likely will not be surprised in the slightest by the identity of the last man standing, it brings a deeply personal edge to the fight, and in addition, certainly gives Karen additional motivation. The result is considerably more of a brawl than anything, neither party giving or receiving quarter, and using whatever is nearby to their advantage.

The scripting here is so bare-bones as to be positively anorexic. For example, the backstory for Karen is put over in a way which you could either call “tersely efficient” or “laughably negligible,” depending on how charitable you might be feeling. While I lean somewhat towards the former, I’d prefer it to have done so in order to get to the meat of the matter faster, in lieu of the extended game of Hide ‘n’ Seek which occupies the first half. However, the film makes good use of its setting, and once things kick off, there’s precious little slack there either. Terrazzino gives a better physical performance than a dramatic one, but given the circumstances, that’s probably the way you want it to skew.

Dir: Greg Swinson and Ryan Thiessen
Star: Natalie Terrazzino, JC Oakley III, Trevor Tucker, Hunter Tinney

Hard Home

  By

★★★
“Home not alone”

Mary (Kessell) has a grudge, and probably with good reason, I’d say. Because the serial killer known as Diablo killed her daughter, Kelly, in a particularly brutal manner – finishing his victim off by burning her alive. With the help of information provided by FBI Agent Selena Wall (Adedeji), Mary puts the pieces of the case together, and eventually lures Diablo (Howard) into attacking her, then brings him back to her house. This has been turned into a hi-tech, maze-like warren designed to force Diablo to confront all his crimes, and in particular his murder of Kelly. Naturally, things don’t quite go as intended. Expecting rational, predictable behaviour from a serial killer was probably a mistake by Mary, despite her technological advantages.

This is certainly a novel take on the themes here: part serial-killer film, part vengeful mother flick. The script generally does a good job of dispensing information at a pace that keeps the viewer’s interest, without revealing everything up front. For example, after Mary gets injected with Diablo’s chosen paralytic drug, there’s a flashback which shows her injecting herself with the same stuff, in order to build up her tolerance, and use this to future advantage. It is a bit of a stretch that she has the perfect set of skills necessary for her task: home improvement, dark web knowledge, twelve years of Brazilian jiu-jitsu, etc. The agent funneling information to Mary is also just a little too convenient. 

If you can overlook these speed-bumps though – and I didn’t find them too problematic – there is still a good amount to enjoy. This starts with Kessell, who comes over as a significantly more credible bad-ass than Jessica Alba in Trigger Warning. She has one mission, and is absolutely not going to let anything or anyone (be they Diablo, her husband, a nosy neighbour or the authorities) get in the way of it. In the early stages after capturing Diablo, she becomes somewhat passive, sitting in her control centre and pushing buttons. But once things go off-track, she is forced into more reactive and pro-active behaviour, the film gradually picking up steam until an impressively grim ending (albeit with a rather odd coda, one I don’t quite get).

Bamford showed up here earlier this year with another film, Air Force One Down. Although this is a little lower on the action scale, up until the end where Diablo and Mary go toe-to-toe, it is balanced out by Home Hard working better in terms of plotting. If flashbacks are sometimes used as a crutch for weak writing, here they are well integrated and move the plot forward. Among the cast, in addition to Kessell, praise is also due to Howard. He doesn’t get a single line over the course of the movie, yet still manages to portray a creepy and despicable villain. However, Diablo might not be as frightening as Mary, who feels the very embodiment of irresistible force.

Dir: James Bamford
Star: Simone Kessell, Andrew Howard, Rachel Adedeji, Joseph Millson

Republic Pictures will release the film digitally on June 25. 

Snatched

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★★½
“Everything comes to he who waits. Eventually.”

The title here seems quite deliberately a nod towards Taken, which similarly has an ex-government operative chewing up and spitting out bad guys, after they make the fatal mistake of abducting the operative’s child. In this case, it’s CIA operative Angela (Bozeman), who lost her husband Jason in murky circumstances, but subsequently put away Dmitri (Weber), the criminal mastermind responsible. Now, six years later, she can get on with living her life, bringing up son Jason Jr. (Cheatham), and hanging out with fellow agent Byron, who seems a possible husband replacement. Well, until Dmitri escapes from prison and starts killing off everyone he considers responsible for putting him behind bars.

Sooner or later – and as we’ll see, it’s not the former – that brings him into Angela’s circle, and ends up in him kidnapping Junior, with the aim of luring her into his (very well-appointed, it has to be said; I particularly liked the chandelier) lair. However, he doesn’t realize what he has done. Once this all gets going, it’s not bad. If hardly seeming an accurate portrayal of CIA practices, unless they’re utterly slipshot and incompetent, it’s kinda fun as long as you don’t ask awkward questions. Such as, where the heck does Angela get those groovy remote-controlled gun-toting little cars? Was Andy Sidaris having an estate sale? Dmitri also has a groovy bad-ass sidekick, Sophia (Camille Osborne), though her fight with Angela is disappointingly brief.

The problem is mostly the long, meandering, roundabout and largely uninteresting way in which the story gets to the amusing stuff. The first half or more is largely comprised of extremely conversational scenes of merely passing interest. In these, Angela talks to Byron about wanting to retire. Or talks to Junior about the realities of her career. Or talks to her mother, Carolyn (Hubert), about her not really a relationship with Byron. Dear lord, it’s far from the action-packed trailer, and you would certainly be forgiven if you gave up on all this soapy drama. Though I was eventually entertained by Carolyn’s ability to kick ass in a grandmotherly way, like Pam Grier on an AARP outing. At least until she encounters Sophia, anyway.

The score above is likely a composite, with two stars for the first half and three for the second, when things do reach an acceptable level of entertainment. Bozeman seems better known as a singer, but does a decent job of portraying the highly upset mother, and has a terse style of close-combat that is effective. On the plus side, it is quite gory, with a number of head-shots and other fairly graphic deaths. On the minus side, these are mostly CGI, as is apparent from the blood spray never landing on anything in the environment. You probably want to have something on hand for the sluggish early proceedings: either a good book, some snacks or an alcoholic beverage would all serve that purpose.

Dir: Chris Stokes
Star: Veronika Bozeman, Charlie Weber, Jered Cheatham, Janet Hubert

Nowhere

  By

★★★
“Survival of the fittest.”

One of the shows we enjoy watching here is Alone, in which ten contestants are dropped off in a hostile location – typically chilly – with limited resources. The last one left standing wins $500,000. It’s a simple concept, yet endlessly fascinating. We sit on our comfortable couch, eating Doritos and passing comment on the failing of the competitors. Especially so when they are hoist by their own stupidity, such as losing their means of starting a fire. This feels not dissimilar, except rather than a survival expert, it’s a woman who finds herself thrown into utterly inhospitable circumstances, and forced to make do by any means necessary – not just for her own survival, but that of her new-born child.

The woman is the heavily pregnant Mia (Castillo), who is fleeing an uncertain present in Spain, hoping to get to Ireland, with her husband Nico (Novas). The route is supposed to involve them being sent in shipping containers along with other refugees, but almost from the off, things go wrong. Mia is separated from Nico; the rest of the occupants are gunned down; and then, just when Mia is on her way, the container is washed off the ship in a storm, leaving her afloat in the middle of the ocean. It’s leaking badly – bullet holes will do this – and even after she has addressed that immediate problem, she has to figure out how to survive, with only the contents of the container. Oh, and then she gives birth.

It is, of course, a very contrived set of circumstances, with the container offering a variety of potentially useful items, rather than being, say, entirely full of agricultural machinery. Similarly, her cell-phone has remarkable battery life and service coverage, though I have read a suggestion the calls she received were actually hallucinations. That might be a shame, as one of them certainly represents the film’s dramatic peak, an utterly heart-rending conversation. It was the point where I suddenly realized I had become invested in Mia’s fate, and cared. It came as a bit of a surprise, and is testament to a good performance from Castillo. Not least because for much of the time, she has nobody to act against except a new-born baby.

The scripting is less effective. As well as the convenience mentioned, the whole opening half-hour proves almost irrelevant. It sets up a scenario where resources have become so short, the government is killing off unproductive members of its own society. Let’s just say: I have questions, yet it serves no purpose in the movie, except to get Mia into her crate. Things improve once it does, and the film becomes a straight survival story, rather than trying to make (I presume) some kind of social point about… something. Not that this stopped me from sitting on my comfortable couch, eating Doritos and passing comment on Mia’s attempts to fish. If only she’d watched Alone, she’d have managed much better…

Dir: Albert Pintó
Star: Anna Castillo, Tamar Novas, Tony Corvillo, Mariam Torres

La Madre

  By

★★½
“Is there such a thing as whiteface?”

I ask, because this film, made in Mexico City and starring mostly Mexicans, seems to be trying to take place in America. It’s not doing a good job of it. The heroine is Martha (Mazarrasa), a single mother running a shop in a border American city with the help of her two daughters, Eva (Reynaud) and Raquel. Then Eva is kidnapped by evil Mexican cartel boss, El Chacal (Guerrerio), and held by him, even after Martha pays the requested ransom. However, it turns out Mom has a hidden past, which gave her a set of special skills. With the help of sympathetic cop, Juan Cinderos (Dulzaides), she sets out to bring down his organization and retrieve her daughter.

It might have worked better if everyone has spoken Spanish, and they’d actually set this in Mexico. Not that Mazarrasa’s English is bad. It’s far better than my Spanish. But early on, she tells her daughters, “Our family has been in this [American] city for generations.” Yet she sounds like she’s still dripping wet out of the Rio Grande: “Ey neeeed tu dooo zees!” It feels particularly fake to me, since I’m married to a first-generation Hispanic immigrant, so know Chris and her siblings sounds completely indistinguishable from native citizens. Literally nobody in the film speaks without a notable accent: the closest is El Chacal, the character you’d least expect to know English. It’s all tremendously off-putting.

The rest of the plotting is similarly shoddy, in particular the way Martha is able to infiltrate El Chacal’s operations and get them taken down from the inside, in a way Paul and his pals have been utterly unable to do. I get that she’s operating outside of the usual legal encumbrances, but building her history and doing more than slapping a wig on her as a disguise, would have gone a long way to avoid my eyebrow entering “Oh, really?” mode. The way a random cop like Paul gets to take part in police actions South of the “border” – quotes used advisedly – didn’t help. All told, too many elements here seem to have wandered into this Tubi Original, from a script discarded by the Hallmark channel.

Yet it’s not entirely worthless, with Mazarrasa just about able to hold things together through a decent central performance. She had a long-running role in Camelia La Texana, so has a handle on the more soapy elements here, and is capable of putting over the raw emotion appropriate to the circumstances. The individual pieces could have been re-arranged into an effective combination. Perhaps if Martha had gone full Liam Neeson from the moment Eva was kidnapped, telling El Chacal, “You just messed with the wrong madre…”, instead of wasting time faffing around, naively trying to negotiate and pay the ransom. That is quite at odds with the street-smart, take no prisoners approach she later shows. Maybe her brains were in the wig as well.

Dir: Mitchell Altieri
Star: Tamara Mazarrasa, Giovanna Reynaud, Javier Dulzaides, Alex Guerrero