THE HUNT (US - 2020) Directed by Craig Zobel. Written by Nick Cuse and Damon Lindelof. Cast: Betty Gilpin, Hilary Swank, Ike Barinholtz, Amy Madigan, Emma Roberts, Ethan Suplee, Wayne Duvall, Glenn Howerton, Reed Birney, Sturgill Simpson, Macon Blair, Christopher Berry, Kate Nowlin, Steve Coulter, Dean J. West, Vince Pisani, Teri Wyble, Usman Ally, Steve Mokate, Walker Babington, Sylvia Grace Crim, Jason Kirkpatrick, J.C. McKenzie, Tadasay Young, Hannah Alline. (R, 90 mins) Originally set to open in September 2019, the Blumhouse production THE HUNT had its advertising suspended by Universal after a string of mass shootings in August. Then its release was canceled entirely once Fox News informed President Trump that it was about conservative "deplorables" being hunted for sport by the liberal elite, sort-of like a MOST DANGEROUS GAME-meets-BATTLE ROYALE for the Rachel Maddow crowd. Several months later, THE HUNT has resurfaced--prefaced by a new and inferior trailer that reveals a little too much--with the hype of being "the movie they didn't want you to see," just in time for the inevitability of US movie theaters closing due to the COVID-19 coronavirus. After that six-month delay, is it worth the hype? Not really. Though if anyone on the right had actually bothered to watch THE HUNT before condemning it as dangerous propaganda from the "loony left," they would've seen that it takes far more potshots at liberals than it does conservatives, and that its right-leaning "final girl" is actually the smartest and most likable character in the film.
THE HUNT opens on a private charter flight with a group of rich, preening, condescending assholes shocked when a burly, bearded guy (Jason Kirkpatrick) breaks into the cabin from the cargo hold in a state of panic and confusion. A doctor (Steve Coulter) stabs him in the neck with a pen, followed by a mystery woman named Athena (Hilary Swank) emerging from a secluded area, stabbing him in the eye with a stiletto heel (the eye sticks to the heel when she yanks it out of the socket), with his corpse dragged back to cargo where others are restrained and sedated. Cut to a young woman in yoga pants (Emma Roberts as "Yoga Pants"), who wakes up gagged in a field in the middle of nowhere. Others have congregated in the area, all gagged and confused. There's a large crate that's pried open, and inside is a shirt-wearing pig named "Orwell," and a small arsenal of weapons. These strangers--in addition to Roberts' Yoga Pants, there's Wayne Duvall as "Don???," Ike Barinholtz as blowhard New Yorker "Staten Island," Ethan Suplee as "(Shut the Fuck Up) Gary," and Betty Gilpin as just Crystal, among others--quickly arm themselves only to be hit by ammo, arrows, and grenades coming from all directions. Most die gruesome deaths right there, but Staten Island and a couple of others make it to a gas station run by Ma (Amy Madigan) and Pop (Reed Birney) that definitely isn't what it seems. But after a few bits of misdirection and protagonist shifts thanks to some unexpected kills, it's Crystal who emerges as the central character, and she immediately proves to be a little more resourceful than her more bloviating far-right counterparts (for all his talk about owning seven guns because it's his Constitutional right, Staten Island isn't very skilled with them). She eventually teams with (Shut the Fuck Up) Gary, an ultra-conservative, Alex Jones-esque podcaster who constantly yammers on about "cucks," "crisis actors," and "the Deep State," and swears they're the latest victims of "Manorgate," a far-right, QAnon/Pizzagate-like conspiracy where "real patriotic Americans" like themselves are drugged, kidnapped, and taken to a manor in an isolated area of Vermont by a secret cabal of smug and impossibly wealthy liberals who set them free in the wild and hunt them for sport.
Well, they're not in Vermont, but it's impossible to say anymore about the plot without spoilers. Director Craig Zobel (COMPLIANCE) has fun staging some outrageously gory kills with near-Troma levels of comedic splatter. The script by Nick Cuse and Damon Lindelof seems adrift as far as what it's trying to accomplish. LOST co-creator Lindelof's involvement is almost certainly where the twists and turns come from, but the political satire is rather toothless, and its shots too easy. A few jabs land: one of the elite liberals crowing about his tweet getting a like from Ava DuVernay, or another wearing a kimono and being accused of cultural appropriation, and their hiring a trainer who was in the National Guard (Steve Mokate), and whose resume includes working as a technical adviser on the Bruce Willis movie TEARS OF THE SUN ("What's that? Is that like, a real title? Was it even in theaters?" they snark). I guess the problem with THE HUNT's political and social satire is that it isn't doing anything other than stating the obvious. It seems to be suffering from the "both sides"-ism that permeates today's news coverage, and as such, it errs on the side of caution by the bulk of the meaner gags being at the expense of the cartoonish liberals.
Granted, they're the villains here and none of the ribbing is unfair (the performative white wokeness and hand-wringing over whether to say "African-American" or "black," and guiltily whining "white people are the worst!"), but this is hardly the next GET OUT in terms of biting social commentary. It isn't even as subversive a politically-charged horror movie as Kevin Smith's underseen RED STATE, and its references and allusions to Animal Farm have all the analytical depth of a procrastinating high schooler's lit class essay cribbed from Wikipedia the morning that it was due. Where it does excel is as a showcase for GLOW's Gilpin, and in a better movie, this would be a star-making breakout. Right from the start, something seems off-kilter about Crystal and her instant grasp on the situation, as if Athena and the others have severely misjudged their prized quarry. In the wrong hands, this kind of reliance on tics, weird facial expressions, nervous sounds, and other oddball eccentricities could've resulted in a mannered, quirky disaster, but Gilpin manages to make Crystal endearingly strange. It's an intriguingly bizarre performance that's the unquestioned highlight of THE HUNT, a live-action comments section that's just a bit too pleased with itself and nowhere near the scorching hot take that it thinks it is.
A chronicle of the early 1980s L.A. Ponzi scheme that led to lost fortunes and two murders, BILLIONAIRE BOYS CLUB had already logged significant time on the shelf long before it found itself tangled in the downfall of co-star Kevin Spacey. Shot in late 2015 and early 2016, the film was quietly released on VOD and on ten screens in the summer of 2018, with news outlets latching on to the film's pitiful $126 opening day gross as if audiences were staying away in protest because of Spacey, when in fact it had no publicity and was getting only one to two screenings a day at those ten theaters, none of which were located in major cities. It got all the exposure of a stealth test screening. Other sites expressed outrage that Spacey was still "getting work" after the scandal, again distorting the big picture and conveniently leaving out the crucial detail that the film was on the shelf for over two years, long before Spacey's (for now) career-ending sexual assault allegations made headlines. It would be nice if all of these articles provided the proper context for the movie's dismal box office take, and as far as releasing it is concerned, let's judge it on what it is rather than on a problematic actor who happens to be in it. Not even factoring whether the movie is good or bad, there's an entire cast and crew who worked on it and shouldn't have to see their efforts get locked away forever just because Kevin Spacey is a fucking creep on his own time. Let's just be glad the next film he and Ansel Elgort both happened to be in, BABY DRIVER, managed to hit theaters before Spacey took his rightful place among Hollywood's post-Weinstein pariahs.
Ah...yes, there it is.
But even factoring out the Spacey situation, BILLIONAIRE BOYS CLUB was probably going straight to VOD anyway. It's essentially a DTV-level WOLF OF WALL STREET, with director/co-writer James Cox (making only his second feature since 2003's Val Kilmer-as-John Holmes saga WONDERLAND...yeah, I forgot that movie existed, too) taking the easy Scorsese-worship route, right down to the sub-GOODFELLAS narration by Taron Egerton (the KINGSMAN movies) as Dean Karny. Dean is a fast-talking Beverly Hills mover and shaker who gets reacquainted with prep school buddy Joe Hunt (Elgort). Dean talks junior-level investment broker Joe, a kid from Van Nuys who got into prep school on a scholarship and never really fit in, into stepping up his game and before long, Joe is engineering an investment firm called BBC (which means nothing; they just like the initials but end up calling it "Billionaire Boys Club"), which is really an elaborate Ponzi scheme that allows them all to live large (cue montage of partying and coke, accompanied by Frankie Goes to Hollywood's "Relax" and David Bowie's "Let's Dance"), but they're paper rich and cash poor. Egocentric, gay Wall Street con man Ron Levin (Spacey) is eventually brought into their circle, which marks the beginning of the end and the bottom falling out, leading to the separate murders of both Levin and a wealthy Iranian businessman (Waleed Zuaiter), on the run from his country's government and who allegedly has a safety deposit box filled with priceless diamonds the BBC wants to cover their losses. This story was already told in a more thorough 1987 NBC miniseries with Judd Nelson as Joe (Nelson plays Joe's dad here) and the sole reason for this shallow and superficial redux to exist is to let some NextGen Leo DiCaprios have some fun in a WOLF OF WALL STREET scenario. There's others in the BBC but we barely get to meet any of them (along with brief appearances by Rosanna Arquette, Bokeem Woodbine, Suki Waterhouse, and Carrie Fisher's daughter Billie Lourd), and Joe's romance with aspiring artist Sydney (Emma Roberts) is strictly by-the-numbers, serving only to try to make Joe a sensitive nice guy while he's ruining the lives of his investors but feeling really conflicted about it. Elgort and Egerton are alright, and Cary Elwes has an amusing cameo as Andy Warhol, but as much as no one wants to admit it, Spacey is the best thing about BILLIONAIRE BOYS CLUB. The film loses pretty much all of its spark once he's whacked with about 40 minutes to go, but if this does prove to be his last film (his completed Netflix biopic about Gore Vidal has been shelved, probably permanently), he goes out with an especially flamboyant take on his usual condescending asshole routine which, let's be honest, is something at which he excels. (R, 108 mins)
SIBERIA (US/UK/Germany/Canada - 2018)
A film whose title may also be the only place in which it played theatrically, SIBERIA stars Keanu Reeves in a ponderous thriller that feels like JOHN WICK reimagined as a European art film. The closest comparison one can make in tone and intent might be 2010's THE AMERICAN, the austere Jean-Pierre Melville-inspired mood piece that found critical acclaim but failed to win over multiplex audiences who were misleadingly sold a George Clooney action thriller. SIBERIA was written by Scott B. Smith, who also scripted A SIMPLE PLAN and THE RUINS, both based on his own novels. Smith is having a really off day with SIBERIA, with Reeves as Lucas Hill, an American diamond smuggler summoned to Russia when his business partner Pyotr (Boris Gulyarin) vanishes along with some priceless diamonds they were supposed to deliver to Russian crime boss Boris Volkov (Pasha D. Lychnikoff). Hill's search for Pyotr leads him to a remote town in eastern Siberia where he falls into an intense fling with local bartender Katya (Ana Ularu, who was memorable as Almost Milla Jovovich in 2016's otherwise completely forgettable INFERNO), despite being generally content in his marriage to Gabby (a mostly Skyped-in appearance by Molly Ringwald). Volkov grows increasingly agitated about the diamonds, which leads to one well-handled bit of excruciating cringe tension a little past the one-hour mark, but nothing really works in SIBERIA, starting with a borderline somnambulant Reeves (one of 31 credited producers), who doesn't seem to fare well these days when he isn't playing John Wick. There's no reason to care about Hill, his situation, or his midlife-crisis acting out with Katya, regardless of how vigorously Reeves and Ularu dive into their numerous sex scenes. It seems odd for any movie to rip off THE AMERICAN at all, let alone eight years down the road, and it's not even a very well-done ripoff, blandly directed by Matthew Ross (FRANK & LOLA) from a script that's so uninspired that Smith couldn't even be engaged enough to come up with a better Russian bad guy name than "Boris Volkov." (R, 105 mins)
THE BLACKCOAT'S DAUGHTER (US/Canada - 2017) Written and directed by Osgood Perkins. Cast: Emma Roberts, Kiernan Shipka, Lucy Boynton, James Remar, Lauren Holly, Greg Ellwand, Elena Krausz, Heather Tod Mitchell, Peter James Haworth, Emma Holzer. (R, 94 mins) Filmed in early 2015 and screened at that year's Toronto Film Festival under its original title FEBRUARY, THE BLACKCOAT'S DAUGHTER has been held up in distribution limbo by A24, who bounced it all over the release schedule from late 2015 and throughout 2016 before pushing it to spring 2017, where it's now bowed on VOD and received a limited theatrical run. While BLACKCOAT gathered dust on the shelf, debuting writer/director Osgood Perkins (son of legendary PSYCHO star Anthony) made another film, the Netflix Original slow-burner I AM THE PRETTY THING THAT LIVES IN THE HOUSE, which ended up being released first. PRETTY THING remains a love-hate proposition: moving at roughly the speed of plate tectonics, it's the absolute slowest of the crop of post-Ti West slow-burner fright flicks over the last several years, and while I appreciated what Perkins was going for, its almost experimental austerity set a land-speed record for going from intriguing to off-putting. Watching BLACKCOAT does enhance PRETTY THING to an extent, but what's odd is that though he made it first, BLACKCOAT feels like the kind of polished and assured sophomore effort of a young director who's gained significant confidence after getting the experience of a flawed debut under their belt. That's not to say PRETTY THING is a step back per se, but it's a step somewhere, a detour in an unexpected direction. There's enough similarities and thematic and stylistic overlap that the films could easily be examined as flip sides of the same coin, but it's PRETTY THING that, in retrospect, ends up coming across like the not-quite-there-yet test run for THE BLACKCOAT'S DAUGHTER. They're unquestionably the work of the same filmmaker but watching them in the order of release rather than the order they were produced actually seems like the more naturally progressive flow.
That doesn't mean THE BLACKCOAT'S DAUGHTER is a multiplex-ready commercial horror flick for the mainstream masses. It's only slight less slow-going than PRETTY THING, but with more characters and more story, so it doesn't have quite the "still life with narration" aura that's a natural byproduct of a movie with essentially two characters with one who's senile and pretty much catatonic. BLACKCOAT is also the most unsettling example of supernatural horror that the genre has offered since THE WITCH from a year ago, which could explain why shared distributor A24 might've wanted some distance between the two. Like PRETTY THING, BLACKCOAT's central characters are female and there are two stories (that element is more pronounced here) that eventually coalesce. At Bramford, an isolated Catholic girls school in upstate New York, the students are leaving for winter break at the end of February. Naive freshman Kat's (MAD MEN's Kiernan Shipka) parents are supposed to pick her up but are nowhere to be found. Older, cynical Rose (Lucy Boynton) deliberately told her parents to pick her up on the wrong day later in the week so she can deal with an unwanted pregnancy. They're the only two girls left at school, and headmaster Mr. Gordon (Peter James Haworth) tells them to stay out of trouble and check in with two prim, proper custodians, Ms. Prescott (Elena Krausz) and Ms. Drake (Heather Tod Mitchell) if they need anything, but otherwise, Rose is instructed to keep an eye on the younger Kat. Rose puts Kat through a bit of a hazing ritual, telling her a creepy fictional story of a girl who was killed on the school grounds when she discovered the Bramford nuns were part of a cult of devil worshipers. Rose sneaks out and spends the evening with her boyfriend but returns to find Kat trance-like in the basement, kneeling before the boiler, an event Kat writes off as sleepwalking.
In the first of what becomes a series of cutaways to a separate storyline, Joan (Emma Roberts) is a young woman who gets off a bus several towns away. She's wearing a hospital bracelet that she quickly removes. Seeing Joan walking along the road, kindly Bill (James Remar) and his cold, stand-offish wife Linda (Lauren Holly), pull over and offer her a ride. She tells them she's going to Portsmith, which is the town right after their destination--Bramford--where they're going to pick their daughter up at school for winter break. While Linda wants nothing to do with Joan, Bill tells her that they've been tested and they find God in the little things that happen--"the little coincidences"--and that she reminds him of someone he knew a long time ago. Meanwhile, back at Bramford, Kat believes her parents are dead and are never coming to get her. Her behavior grows increasingly erratic, with a concerned Rose asking if there's anything she can do. "No," Kat replies. "You had your chance."
It's hard to discuss THE BLACKCOAT'S DAUGHTER's story any further without spoiling it or divulging too much information about exactly how these two seemingly unrelated plot threads come together. Perkins cleverly misdirects you into thinking one thing, but it's all a distraction from what he's really setting up (it's the kind of film where you immediately want to watch it again to see how you were tricked and manipulated). Aside from one well-crafted jump scare where the staging has a striking similarity to the staircase murder of private eye Arbogast in PSYCHO (an affectionate nod to the filmmaker's father), Perkins is more concerned with establishing a mood, slowly and methodically tightening the screws and ratcheting up the tension with a lot of help from a persistently droning, rumbling, ambient score by his brother Elvis Perkins, whose haunting "Blackcoat's Daughter" lullaby will chill you and make your hair stand on end. All of this, in conjunction with the slow pace, makes the sense of dread and doom not just unsettling but downright suffocating. Joan, Kat, and Rose are extremely well-rounded and thoroughly fleshed-out characters whose arcs go in completely the opposite direction than you expect as you get to know them after their initial intros: mean girl Rose ends up being the most sympathetic, especially after completely underestimating Kat, who's not the naive innocent she seems. And Joan...well, you'll just have to see.
Perkins has constructed THE BLACKCOAT'S DAUGHTER in such a way that everything you think you know is up-ended with each shift from Kat & Rose back to Joan, Bill & Linda. Each revelation ends up altering your perspective on everything that happened in the early stages. There's some terrifying moments here and with rare exception, they're the kind that sneak up on you, unease turning to discomfort before escalating to anxiety and terror. THE BLACKCOAT'S DAUGHTER will rattle even the most jaded, seen-it-all horror fan (one character picking up a phone to hear a gurgling voice ordering "Kill all the cunts" is particularly unnerving). Like a lot of genre fans, I'm old enough and I've seen enough over the last 40 years that, aside from an occasional WITCH, BABADOOK, or IT FOLLOWS to cite just three recent examples, it's hard to be surprised in a big way by new horror films anymore. But when this got firing on all cylinders and the pieces began falling into place, it was really getting under my skin and by its emotional end, left me shaken in a way that I haven't experienced with a horror movie in a long time. Possibly the scariest film to take place at a girls school since Dario Argento's SUSPIRIA, THE BLACKCOAT'S DAUGHTER is that most welcome of surprises--a disturbing, stomach-in-knots fright flick that quietly burrows its way into your head and will fuck you up for days after seeing it. Well done, Perkins. Your dad would be proud.
One of the very few titles from The Asylum to actually be released in theaters (not counting one-off crowd-participation SHARKNADO screenings for people who think SHARKNADO is a cult movie), MERCENARIES is a little more straight-faced than the typical pre-fab cult movie nonsense to roll off the company's mockbuster assembly line. Whether it's cheesy monster movies along the lines of the SHARKNADO phenomenon, MEGA SHARK VS. GIANT OCTOPUS and MEGA PYTHON VS. GATOROID, or shameless no-budget knockoffs like I AM OMEGA, TRANSMORPHERS, SUNDAY SCHOOL MUSICAL, STREET RACER, and TITANIC II, The Asylum has become synonymous with self-aware shittiness. MERCENARIES is their EXPENDABLES mockbuster, given a limited release on a handful of screens and VOD a week before THE EXPENDABLES 3, and the twist is that the heroes are all ass-kicking women in a bid to beat Sylvester Stallone's proposed EXPENDABELLES spinoff to screens (which probably isn't going to happen anyway). MERCENARIES has what probably passes for witty, self-referential dialogue, at least as much as screenwriter Edward DeRuiter is capable of pulling off, but it generally plays it straight and keeps the winking snark to a minimum. It's obvious The Asylum was taking this one a little more seriously than most of their productions and were using it to see if they could compete with the big dogs at the multiplex. Alas, they can't. The opening credits are video-burned and the explosions all look like they were done with the Action Movie FX app on director Christopher Douglas-Olen Ray's iPhone. Ray is the son of veteran hack Fred Olen Ray, who's cranked out around 150 action and exploitation films under various names since the late '70s. The elder Ray almost had a real career at one point in the late '80s when he was giving prominent roles to aging, past-their-prime actors years before Quentin Tarantino made it trendy, but now he and Jim Wynorski pretty much have the market cornered on helming the kind of no-budget Skinemax films that run on cable at 3:00 am or terrible kiddie movies that have their world premieres on Netflix Instant. Christopher proves that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, as he's found consistent work as one of the in-house Asylum guys, and there's a few fleeting moments where MERCENARIES looks like a perfectly acceptable DTV-level actioner like his old man used to make, at least until the crappy CGI and digital blood start derailing it. MERCENARIES' biggest sin is that it's just boring, with an endless, talky mid-section that brings the whole thing to a standstill.
The film has a game cast, headed by DEATH PROOF's Zoe Bell, TERMINATOR 3 star and Uwe Boll regular Kristanna Loken, KILL BILL star-turned-TV fixture Vivica A. Fox, and BRING IT ON's Nicole Bilderback as a team of disgraced military and CIA washouts sprung from prison by NSA head Kendall ('90s DTV action star Cynthia Rothrock) when the President's daughter (Tiffany Panhilason) is abducted by international terrorist Ulrika (Stallone ex-wife and RED SONJA herself, Brigitte Nielsen). Their job: rescue the First Daughter and bring Ulrika in alive and get full pardons for their past offenses. Bell fares better here than in the unwatchable RAZE, and the others seem to be enjoying themselves, but MERCENARIES isn't nearly as fun as it should be. Some instances of ridiculous dialogue provide some occasional amusement--Rothrock describing Nielsen as "an Amazonian she-bitch in the backwoods of Shitholistan" and Fox declaring "Hell, I might even fuck George Clooney...with a strap-on!"--and segues between scenes being depicted as comic book panels show that Ray and The Asylum have the right idea, but MERCENARIES needs a better director, a better script, and a bigger budget. The action scenes are mostly competently-staged but unexciting and for every quotable zinger we get, there's ten than clang to the ground ("I don't know who's the bigger bitch...you or her" and Bell replying to "So what's the plan?" with "We go PMS From Hell on this place!"). The title quartet is fine, Rothrock is funny, and Nielsen attacks her role with gusto, so on one hand, being that it's an Asylum joint, MERCENARIES is marginally better than you might expect, but as far as theatrical releases go, they still aren't ready for the big leagues. The cast came ready to party--it's too bad the material didn't match their enthusiasm. (Unrated, 89 mins) PALO ALTO (US - 2014)
James Franco produced and co-stars in this adaptation of his short story collection Palo Alto Stories, a film that marks the writing and directing debut of Gia Coppola, granddaughter of Francis Ford Coppola and niece of Sofia Coppola. Gia inspired and helped shape her grandfather's most recent film, the personal TWIXT (2012), and the pair have always shared a special and tragic bond: Gia's father Gio Coppola was killed in a speedboat accident in 1986, seven months before she was born. There's no doubt Grandfather Francis takes extra pride in seeing Gia represent the next generation in the Coppola legacy. PALO ALTO isn't a particularly distinguished debut--some good performances carry it through but the storylines have a too-familiar feel to them. We've seen too many films like this before and PALO ALTO has nothing new to say. Nevertheless, it's well-made and it's nice to see the sense of genuine love and support of Coppola family members putting in appearances in support of the first-time director. Franco's book and Coppola's film follow a loosely-connected narrative of teen angst and excess. Adults are difficult to find in this world, and the ones that are around are ineffective and irresponsible. Virginal nice-girl April (Emma Roberts) is on the soccer team and has a crush on affable stoner Teddy (a debuting Jack Kilmer, Val's lookalike son). Teddy constantly falls victim to the bad influence of his obnoxious buddy Fred (Nat Wolff of THE NAKED BROTHERS BAND), who's using April's promiscuous friend Emily (Zoe Levin). April also finds herself drawn to Mr. B (Franco), her soccer coach and a single dad who frequently has her babysit his young son. Not nearly as caustic and abrasive as Larry Clark's 1995 "wake-up call to the world" KIDS, PALO ALTO is cut from the same cloth as hard-R post-KIDS teen dramas like THIRTEEN (2003), HAVOC (2005) and TWELVE (2010), which also co-starred Roberts. It's perfectly watchable but fairly standard-issue and forgettable, though Roberts is good and young Kilmer shows promise. The large cast of familiar faces also includes Val Kilmer as April's stoner stepdad, Chris Messina, Colleen Camp, Marshall Bell, Janet Jones Gretzky, Don Novello, Margaret Qualley (THE LEFTOVERS), Christian Madsen (son of Michael), Ana Bogdanovich (Peter's sister), and Coppola family members Talia Shire, Jacqui Getty (Gia's mom), and the voice of Francis as a judge sentencing Teddy to community service after a DUI hit and run. (R, 100 mins)
SWELTER (US - 2014)
Meeting a demand that doesn't exist, SWELTER arrives in 2014 looking and feeling a lot like any number of Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez knockoffs that were taking up space on video store shelves in the late 1990s. It's got a quartet of criminals in matching black suits to remind you of RESERVOIR DOGS. It's got a shitkicker bar to remind you of FROM DUSK TILL DAWN. It's got hip pop culture dissertations and references to people like Joey Bishop and Jayne Mansfield to remind you of other possible waiters and waitresses at Jack Rabbit Slim's in PULP FICTION. And it also wears its western influences--Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone, in particular--on its sleeve. But writer/director Keith Parmer doesn't come close to emulating the style, pace, and filmmaking skills of Tarantino or an in-his-prime Rodriguez, and despite some potential and one standout supporting performance, SWELTER is a draggy, dreary, and dull endurance test of a thriller. After ten years in prison for a Vegas casino heist they pulled off while wearing Rat Pack masks that look nothing like the members of the Rat Pack, a crew of vengeful criminals have arrived in the "middle of fucking nowhere" Death Valley town of Baker in the midst of a record-shattering heat wave. There's leader Cole (Grant Bowler of the SyFy series DEFIANCE) and his psychotic younger brother Kane (co-producer Daniele Favilli), who are in no way characters influenced by the Gecko brothers in FROM DUSK TILL DAWN, along with hot-tempered Boyd (Josh Henderson) and the calm, reserved Stillman (Jean-Claude Van Damme in some offbeat and ultimately squandered casting). They're in Baker looking for Sheriff Bishop (busy TV actor Lennie James), who suffers from amnesia and can't remember the events that brought him to Baker a decade earlier. It turns out he used to be known as Pike (also, "Pike Bishop" being the name of William Holden's character in THE WILD BUNCH) and was the fifth member of Cole's Rat Pack crew. Bishop/Pike made off with the $10 million but suffered a head injury in the escape and can't remember what he did with the loot. That's not a good enough excuse for Cole, who wants his money and Bishop's girlfriend (MARIA FULL OF GRACE Oscar nominee Catalina Sandino Moreno)--his ex--back.
It's clear that Parmer is a fan of old westerns and running that through a late '90s indie crime thriller filter isn't a bad idea in theory, but nothing in SWELTER works. The pace is extremely slow, the characters are cardboard cutouts, and only a slumming Alfred Molina as the drunk town doc manages to hold your attention, but he's not in it nearly enough. It's nice to see British actor James getting the lead role in a feature, but he's been better-utilized elsewhere. Parmer's biggest blunder is wasting an opportunity to let Van Damme show his range. Van Damme appearing in character actor mode is a significant departure from the norm for him, so I'm utterly bewildered as to why he's saddled with the thankless role of Grant Bowler's sidekick. Bowler's OK in a third-string Sean Bean kind-of way, but not having Van Damme play the chief villain is an absolutely boneheaded decision on everyone's part. Subplots about Bishop's girlfriend's daughter (Freya Tingley) and the town preacher (Arie Verveen) only exist to pad the running time until the final showdown between Bishop and Cole, complete with a background windmill making the same creaking noise as the one in the opening sequence of a ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST. The references are nice and Parmer is obviously a movie nerd who knows his shit, but you have to bring more to the table than that. Giving Van Damme a reason to be in the movie other than serving as the most prominently displayed cast member in the DVD cover art would've been a good first step. At one point, Van Damme groans "I'm getting too old for this shit." Indeed you are, sir. (R, 100 mins)
