★½
“Robbed of two hours of my life.”
I’ve seen worse films, to be quite clear. Technically, this is perfectly acceptable, with an apparently reasonable budget, put to decent use. But I don’t think I’ve seen one which has been more annoying. It manages to hit that sweep spot of being both incredibly stupid, while also congratulating itself for being very smart in its attempts at social commentary. But the annoyance extends beyond that, to purely instinctive reactions like really bad hairstyles sported by some players. I can’t explain these responses, and am not interested in analyzing or defending them. But they certainly played their part in my steadily increasing irritation at the plot, characters and execution, over an excessively long running-time of one hundred and sixteen minutes.
The heroine is Robbin (Serayah) – and, yes, there are two b’s there. She is a former bank employee, who was falsely accused of stealing two million dollars. With the evidence stacked against her, she took a plea agreement rather than risk a long jail sentence. When she gets out, she decides the best way to respond is… by actually stealing from the bank. Yeah. Let that morality and wisdom sink in. She assembles her old crew from the South Central ‘hood where she grew up, and they begin planning their heist. But one theft is deemed insufficient payback, and another, even bigger robbery is planned. This is despite the increasing attentions of the police, including a detective (Lee), who has known Robbin and her friends since they were kids.
Far and away the worst thing here is the script, also by Stokes. It demonstrates a repeated, startling level of ignorance about how banks work, how computers work [authority check: I spent over a decade in IT with HSBC], and how the police work. For example, in the world of this movie, a detective under announced and active investigation by Internal Affairs for corruption, is not only allowed to keep working on the case concerned, she then gets to lead a raid on the suspects’ base of operations. #NotHowCopsOperate Hell, you could possibly also throw how criminals work onto this heaping pile of no-knowledge, since at one point a robber clearly asks a bank cashier for “No unmarked bills.” Um… shouldn’t that be “No marked bills”?
Then there’s the whole clunky parallels to Robin Hood, beginning with the heroine’s first name. All her team – fresh off robbing a convenience store, I note – suddenly acquire altruistic reasons for their move into big-ticket crime. Add on a nasty racial strand, where just about everyone black is good, and everyone white is malicious and evil, to an almost tiresome degree, and you will perhaps begin to see from where my irritation stems. “Tubi Originals” are well-known for setting a low bar, to put it kindly. This falls short of reaching that bar. If it weren’t for the fact that Tubi is a free service, I would seriously be contemplating cancelling my subscription.
Dir: Chris Stokes
Star: Serayah, Erica Pinkett, Jadah Blue, Robinne Lee


You could accuse this film of pulling a bait-and-switch. The first thirty minutes are set up to point emphatically towards one scenario. It then goes off in a completely different direction for much of the final hour – one very clearly inspired by French New Wave of Horror masterpiece,
What’s unusual here is that, allow this is an American production, the cast and crew are almost entirely of South Asian origin. Which is fine, except that writer/director Gil has an imperfect grasp of English. Witness the opening voice-over, which I present verbatim: “There are three wants which can never be satisfied. That of the mastermind who want more, that of the peddler who pray for more, and that of the whistle stopper who don’t know when to say enough.” Um, yes? Fortunately, it’s not too dialogue-heavy, and the plot is mercifully basic, albeit needlessly cluttered up with jumps around in time of weeks, months or days, which a more skilled creator would have avoided.
Coincidentally, I watched this the night after Sinners, another period piece which looks at the place of a specific culture in society. There, it was music in predominantly black society of the thirties; here, it’s professional wrestling in the overwhelmingly white society of the fifties [the presence of in this WWE champion Naomi as Ethel Johnson, feels very much a token gesture]. Definitely fewer vampires in this, however. It’s the story of Mildred Burke (Rickards), who went from working as a waitress in a diner, though wrestling at carnivals, to become one of the biggest draws in the ring of her time. The end of the film calls her the first woman to become a millionaire through sports.
I’m not sure whether this is too long or too short for its own good. Could be a little bit of both. As the tag-line for this review suggests, it bears more than a superficial resemblance to 
I was considerably less impressed with
Here’s a real obscurity. 18 years old, and yet still with a mere seven votes on the IMDb. There, I had to find it by going through the director’s name, as the title brought up nothing. To be fair, it’s not even the best-known film of the year, because some guy called David Lynch made a short called Ballerina in 2007. But it turns out to be an early work from Mauser, whose
Right in the middle of us watching this, Chris got a text from our daughter: “I think we rented the wrong version of Ballerina…” Yes, independently, she was watching the same film. The difference is, we understood what we were getting into. We knew this was a mockbuster from infamous purveyor of such things, The Asylum. I thought the concept of people mistaking Asylum movies for the real thing was an urban legend. Courtesy of our daughter, we now know better. Or worse. For this is, of course, not fit to lace up Ballerina‘s shoes, and anyone expecting it will be sorely disappointed. Yet it’s not irredeemable. I’ve seen considerably worse. From The Asylum, in particular.
After the pleasant surprise which was