Netflix And Chill: Dead Man Down (2013)

As prone to the whims of Netflix as many others who browse the service, I saw that Dead Man Down was on there are remembered that someone had once told me it wasn't a bad little crime thriller. It was, according to some of the ways I had seen it labelled, actually a neo-noir, which made this month as good a time as any to check it out. And whoever told me that it wasn't a bad little crime thriller was quite correct.

Colin Farrell plays a man working for crime boss Alphonse (Terrence Howard). These are bad people who do bad things. But Farrell has more secrets than most. And that allows him to end up in a position where he can be blackmailed by Beatrice (Noomi Rapace), a neighbour who wants suitable punishment to be administered to the man who disfigured her in a road accident. Farrell is working on a masterplan that is now due to be complicated, Rapace grows closer to him as they prepare to deliver the payback she feels that she needs, and Howard and his crew (including Darcy, played by Dominic Cooper) start to "draw the wagons into a circle" as they deal with someone trying to cause division and death among their ranks.

Perhaps wrongly marketed at the time of release, I recall a lot being made of the fact that this from the director of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (which gave Rapace her star-making turn) and I think there was a trailer that emphasised some of the action moments, which is what trailers do. I liked The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, but didn't love it. And I wasn't willing to rush out and see Colin Farrell in another action thriller that wasted his talents in the middle of some bland mess. I believe others may have felt the same way (and we can all be thankful that we've had so many better performances from Farrell over the past decade since people stopped trying to sell him in those roles), but don't let that put you off.

Niels Arden Oplev does another good job in the director's chair, giving the film a similar look to his previous outing, but with more rays of light shining through here and there. The script, by J. H. Wyman, who has more experience with TV work than movies, is as good as it needs to be. Based around that old chestnut of "if you set out for revenge then you'd best dig room to serve two cold dishes", or something, the central pairing of Farrell and Rapace works well enough to have you worrying as it looks less and less likely that anything will lead to a happy ending.

Speaking of the two leads, they both do very good work here, even working at various times with various accents. It also helps a lot that the supporting cast has some great players mixed in. Howard and Cooper have large roles, but there are also smaller turns for Isabelle Huppert, F. Murray Abraham, and the always entertaining Armand Assante. A lot of the other cast members are generic gang member types, but that is perfectly fine when you are just waiting to see the bodycount go up and up on the way to a tense third act.

Not an easy film to assume that others will enjoy as much as I did, I still recommend checking it out. The 2-hour runtime flies by quickly enough, the familiar plot is handled well, and there are some surprisingly satisfying moments of violence as soon as the motivation for everything becomes clear.

7/10

You can buy the movie here.
American friends can pick it up here.

Prime Time: The Club (1994)

The Club isn't a particularly terrifying, or original, horror film. It's a slick teen movie that peppers the runtime with moments attempting to show interesting character dilemmas and moments showing a grinning villain wisecracking as he dances around those who are in peril. Easy enough to forget, it somehow still has enough charm to make me want to save it from complete obscurity.

It's prom night. One couple (Kyle and Laura) are at a stage in their relationship when it looks like the best thing for them to do is go their separate ways. One couple (Amy and Evan) seem happy enough with one another, but there's a lecherous, and potentially dangerous, counsellor (Mr. Carver) to deal with. And one young man (Darren) is miserable enough to be considering suicide. The clocks stop at midnight, leaving these six characters alone and trying to figure out just what is going on, with a young man named John Rotman on hand to further mess with their minds.

Although director Brenton Spencer has a large body of TV work in his filmography, The Club is a rare non-TV feature for him, and the same goes for writer Robert C. Cooper (billed here without the middle initial). Perhaps that explains why this sometimes has a made-for-TV feel, but I can see it being potentially problematic when it came to raising the money for a horror film that wasn't part of a franchise heading downhill at this point. There are still genre gems to be found from this time but they're few and far between, with mainstream American horror feeling quite stagnant in the '90s, before the shot in the arm that came from Scream and the second shot that came from the success of The Blair Witch Project at the end of the decade.

The cast are a mixed bag. Rino Romano and Andrea Roth are a bit too bland as Evan and Amy, whereas Zack Ward and Kelli Taylor do better with their more troubled characters. Matthew Ferguson is okay in the role of Darren, although he's pretty much sidelined for most of the movie, with the exception of his one main scene, and the ever-enjoyable Kim Coates is as . . . enjoyable as ever in the role of Mr. Carver. J. H. Wyman (billed as Joel Wyner) is surprisingly good fun in the role of Rotman, although he only really comes into his own during the third act, when the script really lets him cut loose and become amusingly impish in almost every scene.

Although it takes a bit of time to get going, perhaps a bit too long for this kind of easy entertainment, The Club picks up enough after the opening third to at least keep viewers entertained until it's time for a few decent set-pieces. That's when you get some good practical effects and some fun confrontations that serve as practice runs for the real battles of wills to come during the grand finale.

Unlikely to make any top lists (unless it's something entitled "fairly enjoyable horror movies you may not have seen and could live without but just give them 90 minutes of your life anyway"), The Club is a decent little time-waster for the undemanding. It's no classic, and relatively bloodless, but it does exactly what it sets out to do.

6/10

You can watch the movie here.
Americans can watch it here.