Tag: USA

I am Rage

  By

★★★½
“Better living through abuse?”

By coincidence, I watched this not longer after the not very good Hunt Club, which covers a not dissimilar topic of women being hunted for sport. This, however, does considerably better with the concept, though it does take a while to get to that point. It begins with Erin (Bendz) going with her boyfriend, Adam (Nelson), to meet his parents for the first time. Also there is his brother and his new girlfriend, Sarah (Whillans). A few ignored red flags and a glass of drugged wine later, the two girls wake to discover themselves the latest in a long line of unwilling blood donors, ready to have their juices extracted and sold to the rich as rejuvenating formula.

And it works, too, as is proven by ageless matriarch Margret (Svetek). However, what the family don’t realize, is Erin is not the helpless victim they wanted. She had been abducted while very young, and subjected to years of horrific treatment, before escaping, brutally killing her kidnappers in the process. So this isn’t her first rodeo, and she’s not happy about it. Inexplicably – and this definitely had me rolling my eyes – Margret does not simply kill Erin, even after becoming fully aware of the threat posed, opting to make her one of the “rabbits” for the hunt. Later, Margret again has the jump on Erin, but opts instead for the old hand-to-hand combat thing. Guess how that works out for her?

Yeah, the story has issues. Such as this supposedly being set in Scotland (and it was indeed filmed there), where the family settled in the 19th century. Yet there’s no Scottish accents to be heard. I’m personally offended. To be honest, the basic concept sounds like some crazy conspiracy theory; if Margret had shape-shifted into a lizard person, I probably would not have been surprised. The notion of Erin being a ticking time-bomb reminded me a bit of Jolt, and its “intermittent explosive disorder”, though some more background might have helped. Perhaps Eric could have escaped from a psychiatric facility? It’s hard to imagine someone who committed multiple murders, even given the circumstances, simply being given a lollipop and released back into the community, with a pat on the head.

Fortunately, this kind of thing never relies on the story. We’re here for the carnage, and the film doesn’t hold back there, with only occasionally unconvincing CGI blood squibbing. The rest is full-on practical, with the heroine ending up wearing a full crimson mask – and it’s not her own blood. Most of the action choreography is solid, though there a few shots where the distances don’t quite match. But it’s nicely terse, with the highlight likely the fight between Erin and Margret in a disused churchyard. There’s some overlap of personnel with Army of One, yet this is notably better. Or, at least, notably more fun, and I’ll happily settle for entertaining nonsense over plain nonsense, any day.

Dir: David Ryan Keith
Star: Hannaj Bang Bendz, Antonia Whillans, Marta Svetek, Derek Nelson

Nemesis

  By

★★½
“Two’s company, Tree’s a crowd.”

I was going to go with “Tree’s company” as the tagline, before I realized I’ve actually used that in three separate, forest-set movies. So I decided to adjust it slightly, and what’s above is indeed very apt. There is a cast of three (3) and the entire thing unfolds in the woods. There isn’t a single set or interior shot in the whole film. Indeed, if you’d asked me, I’d have said this had all the hallmarks of a COVID-era project, designed to be shot with a small cast and in a nicely sanitary, outdoor location. Not so, even though Tubi dates it as 2020. There was a screening in April 2019, well before anyone had heard of Wuhan, and the IMDb gives it a year of 2017.

McKenzie Montero (Villegas) is a bounty hunter transporting a fugitive she has captured back to civilization. Her car is involved in an crash, and her captive, murderer Noah Burnham (Wilder), escapes into the expanse of woods by the road. McKenzie goes in pursuit, but ends up having to babysit the driver of the other car, Abigail Stroud (Slattery), who professes to be concerned about McKenzie’s health after the accident. Except, almost none of the preceding statements are 100% accurate. In particular, we learn that Abigail is actually an accomplice of Noah – albeit somewhat reluctantly – and her motives obviously do not line up with those of her new friend. McKenzie, meanwhile, is desperate to get the reward Noah represents, and will not let anyone get in the way.

Given the constraints under which its operating, this is not a terrible time-passer. However, I can’t say that the various twists ever came as quite the shock the writer seemed to think. It felt obvious from the start that Abigail was not the innocent driver she claimed to be, and the way the relationship between her and McKenzie went from zero to BFFs, confiding secrets, seemed a tad forced. On the other hand, I’d like to have learned more about some elements, such as Noah’s claim to be an officially sanctioned serial killer, working for the US government. As is, this seems inserted as a rather crude way to leave the viewer uncertain of who the “good guy/gal” is, given McKenzie is not exactly law-enforcement herself.

As such, you will soon realize there are no real heroes here, with each of the trio clearly intent on manipulating the other two, to their respective ends. For instance, Abigail and Noah need McKenzie, because she’s the only one who can get them out of the woods. Watching this mental chess game unfold, in between bouts of adequately-staged physical confrontation, is when the movie is at its most entertaining. I was never sure until the very end who was going to be able to walk away by the time everything was decided. The problem was, though, that when the final credits rolled, I realized that I did not particularly care about anybody’s fate either.

Dir: Carl Joglar
Star: Colleen Slattery, Sarah Villegas, Nicholas Wilder

Stowaway

  By

★½
“Doesn’t hold water.”

I had quite forgotten that Rose was part of John Wick: Chapter 2 in 2017. That should have been a gilt-edged opportunity on which she could have built over the following years to become a top action actress. But she managed to squander the chance, getting herself fired from Batwoman, and then making a series of largely unimpressive vehicles, which came and went without any impact. Perhaps it’s a symptom of insanity, in the sense of repeating the same action, hoping for a different result, but we keep reviewing them here. The Doorman, Vanquish and now this, which is certainly not going to rejuvenate anything. Its sole point of note is more or less it being a home invasion movie, which is set on a ship.

The heroine is Bella (Rose), who gets a call out of the blue, informing her that her long-estranged father has died, and left her a boat. This isn’t any boat either. It’s a $10 million, ocean-going yacht, much to her astonishment. Taking advantage of it, she crashes out on it one night. The next morning, she awakens to find it heading out to sea, the craft having been hijacked by her late father’s former associate, Meeser (Grillo), and his two henchmen. They are intent on breaking into the safe on board, which they believe contains $80 million in gold. Bella’s presence on the boat is just as unexpected to them, as they are to her, and threatens to pose a major problem in their plan to crack the safe and scuttle the ship.

This really does the bare minimum in just about every area. The villains are the Leader, the Psycho and the Nice One, while the only surprising thing about Bella is that she finds someone willing to have a one-night stand on the boat [really, that crew cut does nothing for me]. We get far too much creeping around the boat, though when the heroine does go toe-to-toe with one of these ex-military guys, she’s inexplicably able almost to match them. Though I did laugh at her response when she’s asked where she learned to fight, spitting back “Prisoner Cell Block H,” a joke likely lost on most non-Australian viewers.

It all proceeds in an utterly predictable fashion. Show Bella a picture of your family? You’re dead. Call the coastguard? You get a visit from Capt. Oblivious. The contents of the safe come as a shock only to Meeser and company, and once you’ve seen the explosives intended to scuttle the ship, there are no prizes for guessing things will end in a poorly-rendered and thoroughly unconvincing CGI explosion. Even Grillo, one of the more reliable of B-movie bad guys, isn’t able to do anything to sail this vessel out of the doldrums in which it quickly is becalmed. It begins to look like Rose’s career may be irreparably holed below the waterline, and is certainly sinking fast. I think that’s probably enough nautical metaphors for the time being.

Dir: Declan Whitebloom
Star: Ruby Rose, Frank Grillo, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Luis Da Silva Jr.
a.k.a. The Yacht

Under Lock and Key

  By

★★★
“From prison to fashion.”

I can’t recall seeing an action heroine movie with quite so much gratuitous nudity, even among the women-in-prison genre in which this (obviously, given both the title and the poster) operate – at least in the early going. It feels like there’s some kind of contractual obligation for a shower, medical exam or just an inmate randomly changing their clothes, about every three minutes in the first half hour. It’s helps that most of the residents appear to be incarcerated for crimes involving beauty parlours. Either that, or there is some kind of quality threshold applies for inmates. I should mention this does adhere to the standards of the nineties: and I’m not speaking about hair on the head, if you know what I mean.

It’s not entirely devoid of story-line, however, and there is an actual plot. Danielle Peters (Westbrook) is an FBI agent who has been sent undercover into the prison. Her mission is to get close to another inmate, Sarah Sands (Smith), who was the girlfriend of a drug kingpin, Carlos Vega (Anthony). Sarah still has a notebook containing compromising information, and Danielle is tasked with finding out its location. It doesn’t go well. Sarah is killed when the vehicle transferring them both gets ambushed, and to make matters worse, Vega kidnaps Danielle’s daughter as leverage. The whole undercover thing ends, with Danielle formally taken off the case. Naturally, she continues her investigation anyway – albeit after a long. hot shower – along with prison guard and new pal, Tina Lamb (Niven).

Let me be 100% clear. None of this makes the slightest bit of sense from the perspective of law enforcement or the penitentiary industry. Danielle’s wilful disregard for FBI procedure never gets her anything that a light tap on the wrist from her boss. And by FBI procedure, I mean the pair committing homicide (arguably justifiable), leading to this exchange with Tina:
    “What do we do with the body?”
    “I’ll call a friend, he’ll take care of it”
That’s not very FBI now, is it? Meanwhile, Tina doesn’t even call to let her employers know she’s going to be busy for a while, taking down an international drug lord ‘n’ stuff. Everyone involved, including their boss, is going to be faced with difficult performance appraisals, when it comes time for their annual review.

Plausibility very much aside, I can’t deny I was entertained by the ludicrous nature of this, which basically aims for the lowest common denominator of cinema, and somehow still manages to come up short. How can you not love a film containing the line, “Jennifer’s not only a high fashion model, but she also works for several European secret service agencies on occasion”? Especially when Jennifer has the blank, placid expression of a cud-chewing bovine. Westbrook does a better job, on occasion looking like her kicks and punches have impact, and having decent presence. While I’ll likely never watch this again, I’m certainly holding back any complaints.

Dir: Henri Charr
Star: Wendi Westbrook, Barbara Niven, K. Phillip Anthony, Stephanie Ann Smith

Guns of Eden

  By

★★
“Fires mostly blanks.”

Buffalo police officer Megan (Sadeghian) is a highly-skilled cop, but has a crisis of confidence after being involved in the accidental shooting of a colleague. To help get her out of that mindset, partner Jeremy (Johnson) invites Megan on a weekend camping getaway in upstate New York, along with another couple. This goes horribly wrong, after they stumble across the summary execution of a drug-dealer by the local sheriff, Preacher (Kennedy) and his death squad. The four campers are now a problem for Preacher, so he seals off the area, and unleashes a slew of hunters, putting a ten thousand dollar bounty on the head of each target. Of course, you don’t have to be psychic to see it won’t be easy, courtesy of Megan.

When your story is one with which every viewer will be familiar, like this, it increases the need to nail the execution. Here, the results are a bit of a mixed bag, and I’m being extremely kind with that description. The best thing the movie had going for it, is Sadeghian in the lead. As the poster indicates, it looks like she could have been a better Lara Croft than Alicia Vikander (y’know, back when Lara still used guns…). She does a good job of commanding the viewer’s attention when she’s on screen. Unfortunately, the villains are feeble in comparison: often they’re the biggest danger to themselves, either deliberately or, in one especially eyeroll-worthy scene, accidentally. There’s a political subtext here too, which seems all the more dubious, given the film’s topic.

The biggest issue, though, are the frequent ways in which its flaws are obvious. A convenience store shoot-out, in which not even a packet of chips is displaced. A villain who gets “knocked out”, by a stone, marginally above pebble sized, lobbed gently toward them. The heroine supposedly being chased by a random hovering helicopter, while the vegetation nearby barely moves. Bad guys (and girls) whose incompetence is only exceeded by their inaccuracy. Thoroughly unconvincing bullet-holes. The list of problems here is just too long to ignore. On the other hand, I very much appreciated the presence of veteran actress Lynn Lowry, as a local who is less than enamoured by Sheriff Preacher. In a movie often teetering on the edge of self-parody, she has a calming influence, that helps keep proceedings grounded.

Lamberson also makes decent use of the wilderness locations. In particular, a series of narrow canyons, that provide a mazelike setting through which the hunters and hunted must proceed. But the good elements – the final knife fight between Megan and Preacher is also energetic – never last long, before something shows up to take you out of the viewing experience. I’d been waiting for this to show up on a streaming service for a while. Suffice it to say, it fell some way short of my expectations, and I probably shouldn’t have bothered getting my hopes up.

Dir: Gregory Lamberson
Star: Alexandra Faye Sadeghian, Bill Kennedy, Peter Johnson, Nicole Colon

Special Ops: Lioness

  By

★★★
“Crossing the Lion…”

If 2023 has been underwhelming on the theatrical front (to put it mildly), the various streaming services have certainly had no shortage of entries to keep us occupied here. This one comes to us from Paramount+, and stars Saldaña – already known around these parts, most likely for Colombiana – as CIA operative Joe McNamara, who uses undercover operatives against terrorist groups around the world. Her most recent mission does not end well, and she needs a new operative. She finds one in Cruz Manuelos (De Oliveira), a young woman who finds herself literally falling into the Marines, as a means of escape from a tough life and an abusive relationship. After acing boot camp, she becomes part of McNamara’s team.

The mission involves adopting the identity of a young Muslim woman and befriending Aaliyah Amrohi (Nur), daughter of a very rich Arab. The CIA believe her father is a major source of terrorist funding, but he is very hard to find. Aaliyah is engaged to be married, and her father seems certain to turn up at the wedding. So it’s up to Cruz, in her new identity, to insert herself into Aaliyah’s circle and get invited to the nuptials, so that the target can be neutralized as appropriate. Of course, it’s not quite as simple as that. In addition, Joe has familial issues of her own, as well as having to handle political manoeuvres among the alphabet soup of federal organizations, all with a finger in the pie.

I feel the characters work better than the scenario, which leans too heavily on cliched elements, such as Cruz and Alliyah falling for each other. I rolled my eyes quite hard at that, though it does lean into the “men are bastards” narrative occasionally present here. Hey, it applies both to American and Arab males, so that’s balanced, right? The scene where Cruz got drink-drugged also provoked ocular rotation. Though I was amused when the would-be date-rapist realized he’d bitten off rather more than expected, when a bunch of pissed-off Special Ops people showed up to rescue their comrade. I also enjoyed Wagner, former ditzy co-host of game show Wipeout, playing someone who looks like she’d give Vasquez a tough fight.

The action stuff is certainly well-staged, with De Oliveira giving a good account of herself through the selection process. And, when necessary, as part of her mission – leaving her with some injuries that required a bit of explanation to her new friend. The finale severely ramped up the stakes, especially when the groom-to-be ran Cruz’s face through facial recognition software. It all got… a bit messy thereafter, shall we say. Though it escapes me quite why he never alerted the large security contingent present about the Marine in their midst. If a lot of this doesn’t stand up to close scrutiny, the cast – also including Nicole Kidman and Morgan Freeman – give it their all, and if there turns out to be a second season, we’ll be down for it.

Creator: Taylor Sheridan
Star: Laysla De Oliveira, Zoe Saldaña, Stephanie Nur, Jill Wagner

The Vigilante

  By

★★★
“The Noise of Freedom”

Not to be confused with A Vigilante, this is rather more downmarket and straightforward. It’s likely less thought-provoking, yet probably works a bit better as entertainment, albeit being so basic as to border on the simplistic. Marine Jessica (Jandreau) comes back from a tour of duty in the Middle East with PTSD, following an encounter with a kid wearing a suicide vest. Almost immediately on her arrival, however, her 13-year-old sister, Aimee (Timmons) is kidnapped by sex-trafficker Frank (Cesario), who plans to sell her off in the vilest of ways. It’s a race against time for Jessica and her army buddy and tech wizard Dan (Pierce) to track down those responsible before… [/gestures vaguely] y’know…

If this feels like it has a certain similarity to an unexpected hit in cinemas this summer, you’re probably right. In the movie’s defense, this has been in the pipeline for five years or more, so it can’t be called a quick cash-in – though The Sound of Freedom goes back even longer. Interestingly, director Whittaker worked on Freedom as a stunt co-ordinator, part of a career in that field which goes back to the early nineties. He brings that experience to The Vigilante and it shows, with the action probably the film’s best element. There are a couple of undeniably impressive fights for Jandreau, in particular the final one after she has located the house in which Aimee is being held by her kidnappers.

The other elements are a bit more variable. It begins with an earnest recitation of facts about sex trafficking, with voice-over from (real?) victims detailing where and at what age they were ensnared. But the concept of Frank literally ploughing into the car in which Aimee is a passenger, in order to kidnap her to order out of the wreckage, is hugely, almost ludicrously, implausible. The reality of sex-trafficking is considerably less dramatic: like murder, it’s far more likely the perpetrator is someone known to the victim, rather than a complete stranger. Some of the other elements also don’t feel like they ring true, and the sheer number of shots of underage girls in white underwear had me expecting Chris Hansen to pop out of my closet.

Another weak spot if quite what Dan is doing to locate the trafficking houses which Jessica and he then hit. It’s only vaguely explained, in tech-speak of the least convincing kind. However, there are times where the film does still hit the mark, such as the line said by one of the girls with almost chilling off-handedness: “The first time is the worst. Then you simply go numb.” You sense any creepiness is entirely deliberate, although it is undeniably playing up the more sensational aspects for the viewer. Nothing new there, of course. In many ways, The Vigilante is simply a spiritual successor to the white slavery movies which date back well over a century to the silent era, and titles like Traffic in Souls. As such, this is no better or worse; it succeeds well enough, despite low ambitions.

Dir: Lee Whittaker
Star: Jet Jandreau, Eric Pierce, Jamie M. Timmons, Julien Cesario
a.k.a. Aimee

Phoenix

  By

★½
“Tubi or not Tubi? NOT Tubi…”

Much though I love the streaming service, even I have to admit that “Tubi Originals” are a bit of a mixed bag, to put it mildly. For every Mercy Falls, an entertaining enough B-movie that punches above its weight, there is also… Well, things like this, which is filled wall-to-wall with non-actors trying to act, among a plethora of other, poor choices. Both heroine and villain are former WWE employees, being known there respectively at Eva Marie and Vladimir Kozlov. The latter comes off better, largely because he doesn’t have to do much more than be a menacing thug in his role as Maxim Vasiliiv, head of a Russian crime syndicate in Miami.

He’s involved in the death of Everett Grant (Couture), which is a bad move, since the corpse’s daughter, Fiona “Phoenix” Grant (Marie), is a combat trainer in the US Army, and does not believe her father killed himself. You can probably figure out the rest of the story without me needing to explain it. To be honest, my notes on the topic would not trouble a cigarette paper, such is the shallowness of the plot. The acting is no great shakes either. A lot of the supporting cast is filled out by people who are clearly more familiar with the inside of a gym, rather than the Actor’s Studio. Consequently, they look the part (even if it’s “Menacing Thug #4”), only for the illusion to be shattered when they deliver lines.

There are a couple of minor exceptions, though the real actors only show up the deficiencies elsewhere. Neal McDonough plays Fiona’s commanding officer, and the always welcome Bai Ling appears as a rather weird role, missing from her IMDb entry, most notable for lipstick and make-up which leaves her looking as if she came right from a booking as a kid’s party clown. All of which would be acceptable, if the film delivered copious amounts of over-the-top mayhem – as you’d expect given the two leads’ histories. The reality is, it’s almost forty minutes before you get Phoenix doing anything of significance. We do first get a shopping montage with her Aunt Grace (Camacho – a former cop who appeared on Survivor, apparently). So there’s that.

Things perk up somewhat thereafter, at least when those involved are kicking and punching each others. These sequences may not make a lot of – read, any – sense, yet they’re preferable to the makers’ feeble efforts in other departments. The scene where Fiona and Maxim have dinner and trade lscklustre barbs, may be the low-water point in this department, though any flashback involving Everett (“It’s Christmas Eve and Dad still hasn’t shown up – or called!”) is probably going to be ranked. When I saw the trailer for this, I was surprised by how little action it seemed to have. Turns out, the answer is definitely “not enough,” and the final ten minutes are not enough to rescue the situation.

Dir: Daniel Zirilli
Star: Natalie Eva Marie, Oleg Prudius, Jessie Camacho, Randy Couture

Heart of Stone

  By

★★
“Entertainment: Impossible”

The Great 2023 Void of Action Heroines continues on. The closest thing we’ve seen to one as a mainstream hit in the cinemas is… um, Barbie. Yeah. Not going there. I was looking at the box-office chart for the year, and excluding movies which were actually released in 2022 e.g. Everything Everywhere All at Once, there is only one single film in the top two hundred we have covered here. Polite Society sits outside the top hundred, at $1,.5m [We will get round to The Wrath of Becky in a bit. It’s #181, with a gross of $168,109.] Last year, we had Everything and The Woman King in the top thirty. 2021 gave us Black Widow; 2020, Birds of Prey and Wonder Woman 1984. The complete lack of tentpole heroines this year is disconcerting.

There has been no shortage of female supporting characters who have kicked butt. We already wrote about the The Women of Mission: Impossible, while John Wick 4 also delivered in this category, among quite a few other successful movies. But if you want to see a GWG take centre-stage, you will not find it in the movies. In some ways, it’s more convenient, to be able to sit at home, in your own comfy chair, with a choice of reasonably-priced snacks, and simply push a button on your remote control. But, it has to be said: quality wise, there’s often a good reason most of these films have gone straight to a streaming service. We’ve already covered a number here. The Mother. Furies. Mercy Falls. True Spirit. Some were decent. Yet none have achieved a seal of approval.

This one certainly won’t, barely reaching the level of acceptable entertainment, and sadly, continuing Gal Gadot’s streak of swings and misses. She blazed onto the scene in Wonder Woman back in 2017, and seemed set to take over the mantle as one of the top action actresses in Hollywood. But she has singularly failed to build on that foundation. She lost a lot of public goodwill for her tone-deaf Imagine video in the pandemic. WW84 was a flop, Red Notice was a quickly-forgotten Netflix Original, and her turn in Death on the Nile was widely-panned, becoming a meme. This, however, was a chance to correct course, putting her front and centre in a movie which, it was clearly hoped, would kick-start a franchise and become the female version of Mission: Impossible.

Ain’t gonna happen.

Two minutes in, Chris turned to me and said, “Is this a movie or a TV series?” and I can see her point. Having watched this just a couple of weeks after the undeniably cinematic Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, the difference is obvious. Harper directed The Aeronauts, which was decent enough, but it seems he is incapable of scaling things up from a balloon basket, to the much larger scope needed here. Part of the problem with the action sequences in particular, is the VR enhancement gimmick the heroine wears, allowing her to get real-time updates from her handler. This too often leaves everything looking like it’s a video-game, and it rubs off on other sequences, such as her parachute jump, which feels thoroughly unconvincing.

The plot is perhaps an even greater weakness, a confusing and unengaging mess. Rachel Stone (Gadot) works for a group called Charter, who use hi-tech surveillance for good (yeah… about that…). She’s embedded as an agent in MI-5, for reasons that are never made clear. Wouldn’t you know it, one of the people on her team, Parker (Dornan), turns out to be plotting to steal The Heart, the super-computer on which Charter relies for their surveillance – and use it, presumably, not for good. He has teamed up with talented young hacker Keya Dhawan (Bhatt) to this end, and only Stone can stop them, recover The Heart, and save her colleagues at Charter, including Stone’s boss Nomad (Okenedo).

Dear god, I almost lost consciousness merely typing the previous paragraph. Reviewing the previous work of writers Greg Rucka and Allison Schroeder, what stands out is an almost complete lack of action movies. Rucka has worked mostly in comics (including the one which became The Old Guard), while Schroeder did, um, Christopher Robin and Hidden Figures. The lack of experience shows. Never mind not having written an action movie, it feels as if neither of them had seen an action movie. If so, they might have realized Stone’s handler flicking VR screen around by gesture, was done twenty years ago in Minority Report. The good ideas here are all like that, things you’ve seen elsewhere, and done better, while the ones the movie can call its own are uninspired in concept and/or execution.

It doesn’t help that the supporting cast are mostly bland. If Gadot does still have reasonable charisma, Dornan is completely forgettable. Bhatt is a thoroughly unconvincing hacker – I might trust her to reset my account password, and apologize for the inconvenience. That’s about it. The most irritating character though, is probably her handler. I get what they were going for, but almost every time he’s involved, it leaves the heroine feeling not much more than a meat-puppet, removing a significant degree of agency from her. I will say, some of the action set-pieces aren’t too bad. There’s a good car-chase through Lisbon, for example. But any secret organization which fills its airship with hydrogen, is certainly not going to remain secret for very long. That’s the level of idiocy we are dealing with in the writing here.

Long before the end, I had mentally checked out, as the film globe-trotted manically from [checks notes] the Alps to London to Portugal to Senegal to Iceland. There’s no denying there was a significant amount of resources expended on this production, though Netflix is notoriously tight-lipped on specific budgets. However, the film doesn’t so much jump the shark, as use it for a 3000-metre steeplechase, when the MI-5 spies have a dance break. Read the sentence again. Roll it around your brain. That it’s to a Lizzo song – unfortunate timing, that – makes it considerably worse. Everything thereafter feels like a waste of those resources, as well as the variable talents of those involved.

Dir: Tom Harper
Star: Gal Gadot, Jamie Dornan, Alia Bhatt, Sophie Okonedo

Panther of the Border

  By

★½
“A load of panths.”

There are times when I can look at a failure of a movie, and kinda see how the various elements could have been arranged to better effect. That’s the case here, where a poverty-row, Spanish-language (but made in Texas) production about rape, revenge and narcos, could potentially have worked. Except, it absolutely doesn’t. It’s the story of Carla Mendoza (Verastegui), who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, working for her boss, Pedro Camargo (Palomo), blissfully unaware he is a cartel leader. As a result, she’s arrested, and ends up spending seven years in prison, while daughter Nina is taken care by her grandmother.

On getting out, Carla vows to take revenge on everyone she considers responsible, which is not a short list. Beyond Camargo, who tried to have her put away for life, it also includes her previous boss (Soberón), who raped and then fired her; Camargo’s rival, La Cobra (played, according to the IMDb, by “La Cobra de Tamaulipas”, though my Internet sleuthing suggests she’s actually called Caty Gutiérrez); Camargo’s wife, who dissed Carla just before the arrest; and, quite probably, the doctor who doesn’t quite exhibit a top-tier beside manner, after Nina is shot when Camargo tries to take Carla out. Our heroine holds grudges like an elephant with a Rolodex (Kids! Ask your parents!), and has taken lessons in the necessary skills to exact payback from those on her list.

Unfortunately, the execution is terrible. The script is a complete mess, at one point repeating the entire sequence of events leading up to Carla’s arrest, which simply confused the hell out of me. Motivations for most characters are unclear, with things happening for no reason, out of thin air, or not at all, being simply described to us. For instance, Nina mounts an assault on La Cobra’s men, which we only hear about third-hand, through a report given to Camargo. This isn’t surprising, since the production values are woeful, with the “police station” and “hospital” battling it out, for the title of Least Convincing Facility. They’re still not as bad as Carla’s combat skills: my grandmother could do better, and she’s been dead for 40 years.

It feels as if the makers ran out of money or script pages, the film ending with Nina miraculously going from coma to 100% well again, followed by Verastegui giving a rousing karaoke rendition of the film’s theme song in a nightclub, before a crowd charitably numbering in double-digits. Even by the low standards of the Mexploitation films we’ve seen previously, this is bad. Yet as mentioned, arranged differently… I actually liked La Cobra, who genuinely acts like I feel a cartel leader would. If the whole film had been her against Carla, for some reason, it would have been on considerably stronger ground. Indeed, the performances in general are okay: most would not feel out of place in my narconovelas. Every other element though, ranges from poor to flat-out terrible.

Dir: Martin Palomo, Luis Antonio Rodriguez
Star: Carla Verastegui, Martin Palomo, La Cobra de Tamaulipas, Héctor Soberón
a.k.a. La Pantera de la Frontera