 |
DVD One in the Gun
 Rating: 3.9 Genres: Thriller Director: Rolfe Kanefsky Writers: Rolfe Kanefsky Stars: Steven Man, Katherine Randolph, Steven Bauer |
| Storyline When Mickey Lewis, a homeless struggling artist crosses paths with Katrina, the beautiful rich wife of Arthur Webb and is enlisted to paint their home, deadly passions ignite. Soon hidden agendas, dangerous seductions, double and triple-crosses spiral Mickey’s life out of control leading to a motel in the middle of nowhere filled with strange people and twisted secrets that all hold the key to the mystery of Mickey’s past, present, and future. All it takes is – ONE IN THE GUN. Written by Rolfe Kanefksy |
|
| Plot Keywords: rich wife, passion, older woman younger man relationship, husband wife relationship, erotica | |
| Details: Country: USA Release Date: 2010 (USA) |
|
DVD One in the Gun
previous post
4 comments
I hate reading the cover blurb on a movie that makes it sound like an action/adventure and then I have to sit through something like this.
They're supposed to use code-words like 'psychological thriller', so you know whether you really want to rent the movie, let alone watch it.
I guess you could compare it to other movies with off-the-wall twists if you really had to, but I think that would be doing those other movies a disservice.
The acting and story can be quite melodramatic and over the top at many points (if intended) so, if you were expecting this sort of movie, you would probably be a bit more forgiving. But the movie continually goes from weird to weirder and was not what I was looking for.
If you've seen other, similar movies (John Cusack , Identity) then you've already seen a decent movie and there's really no need to rehash a good concept with bad acting and bad writing.
If you watched the movie and liked it, fine. But it's really not what you would expect from the DVD slip cover.
(1.) Cheesy acting and script. The dialogue sounded like it came from a high school drama class project. Quality acting credits? As is typical in these movies it is nearly invisible. Lots of TV videos, shorts or such movie classics as "She Alien", "Savage Island", "Return of the Killer Shrews", "Pimp Bulies", "Swamp Shark". (2.) Creating a lot of confusing, is it a dream or is it real, subplots only works with a quality script, plot and acting otherwise it's just arrogant look at clever me, "I can confuse you." writing and directing. (3.) Storyline: Some homeless guy bumps his shopping cart into some wealthy chick's shopping cart in the middle of a mostly empty parking lot. "Whoops, sorry, I didn't see you. How clumsy of me." Within the next 10 minutes he's recruited to come live with her and her husband and, oh, also kill him. But she doesn't know that the husband hired him as a cheap private eye to check on her. To make this a love quadrangle, is another boyfriend, who has been recruited by the wife to steal her husband's prized painting and sell it to some accent laden crook in a warehouse for 5 million – sure! Private eye shoots all the people involved in the painting heist, steals the money, and for some bizarre reason decides to just put one bullet into the gun afterwards, then spins the chamber and walks around in broad daylight and the rest of the movie like it's fully loaded. Does not make sense storytelling, does not equate with good storytelling. The final result is, quite implausibly, the wife lives and private eye dies. Anybody else that appeared in the movie is just forgotten about.
Choosing to delve into Redbox Instant, in part due to the free trial, I picked this to watch first as it was the first one alphabetically that wasn't on Netflix already. That and I admire Robert Davi. So throwing caution to the wind (my previous experiences with the films of Rolfe Kanefsky have been less than stellar to put it diplomatically, read my review of "Pretty Cool" for more on that), I decided to give it a go, the results may surprise you… Or not.
In a technical aspect, this film is atrocious, the sound is out of sync, which got annoying and at times felt like I was watching a badly-dubbed foreign film. The acting was very melodramatic, but after a while I was surprised to find that the film was growing on me like some utterly bizarre type of fungus. Well to a point at least, there's a shift of tone at some point that the film takes a nosedive after. But be that as it may, suffice it to say I did ultimately enjoy it much more than the aforementioned dismal Pretty Cool films and more than his more well-known and slicker but utterly forgettable Nightmare Man.
IMHO the current score of 3.9 out of 10 is too low for this film. No doubt if one were to compare the production standard to The Dark Knight Rises it probably might seem a bit shabby, but that's not the point. It's my belief that we have to judge films to a certain extent according to what they achieve with the resources available. And this shoestring budget production delivered a fairly solid twist-and-turn psycho-noir that we'd all be drooling over had it been directed by David Lynch.
The script, direction and acting were quite strong. Even within the modest limits of available budget there were moments of poetry, some fancy shots, psychological and philosophical sophistication etc. But, sad to say, the film was let down by two elements usually used to hide narrative deficiencies – the lighting and the production design.
Lighting wise it felt there was never quite a full commitment to either Drive-style contemporary film soleil, or classic-era low key noir – instead the majority of the scenes seemed to have flat and characterless lighting that brought to mind cheap daytime TV. I get it that there probably wasn't much money to play with for the production design, but it doesn't have to be expensive to paint a wall. So many of the motel and apartment sets were beige and camel and white with very little wall adornment – paint those walls plum and purple and crimson and you instantly add some Lynchian richness and menace.
The largely Hitchcockian score by Christopher Farrell was good – I've heard his work in some other films recently and have been impressed by his range and creativity. It's a shame he wasn't given more time or leeway to work on the sound design – because even a base layer of subliminal percussion and white noise would have elevated the mood of the whole piece.
Overall I give this film a solid 7 out of 10, although I'll be submitting a 10 out of 10 vote on the page to try to balance out the unfairly low current score.