Director: Amy Goldstein
Writers: Amy Goldstein and Scott Kraft
From: Cult Cinema
An assassin is tasked with killing 5 operators of a child sex ring, but she’s being stalked by her former partner who wants her to return to killing with him.
This movie is a Marimark Production and I’m already angry.
Which is unfair because the movie, from the intro, gives every indication of being really clever trash. The title sequence is done as a 90’s arcade game that’s activated by someone putting a token with a gun on it in the coin slot. That decision is so stupid that I couldn’t help but get my hopes up.
A man is playing the game, or at least watching the movie happen on the screen. We’ll call him “the guy” because screw this movie and any pretense of trying to figure out what it’s doing. He’s watching “Angel” get assigned her new list of targets: five people involved with child sex slavery. The people in charge have chosen her for this job because she apparently was trafficked herself.
She takes the job and the guy says, “It doesn’t matter which side you’re on, as long as you play the game.” They’re talking about sex slavery! Having seen the entire movie, he’s not. He sees the assassination trade as a game and talks in terms of “the game” and “playing” in an annoying way throughout the movie, but it’s a bad moment to have at the top of your film.
We cut to her leaving the site of the first kill—we don’t see who she killed or how—and finding some douchecanoe stealing her motorcycle. Since she’s the baddest badass to ever badass, she stops him and immediately uses him as her alibi so she can safely leave the scene of the crime. She takes douchecanoe with her and has sex with him.
The sex scene, by the way, lasts longer than any other scene up to this point in the movie.
And this pattern plays out throughout the movie. She gets the assignment to kill someone by playing The Silencer arcade machine, kills the target almost immediately, then returns to hook up with someone. After douchecanoe, who initially seems like someone she’s going to groom a la The Professional, she dumps him and hooks up with an employee at the arcade. The only reason they don’t have sex there is the condom machine is broken. She returns to him throughout the rest of the movie, though they never have a sex scene.
Anyway, the killings aren’t the plot, this not-quite love story is. Maybe? The guy kills douchecanoe for hooking up with Angel and makes vague threats about killing arcade boy. Arcade boy won’t leave unless Angel quits being an assassin. Meanwhile, Angel saves a young girl from getting kidnapped and raped. Angel gives her a pair of sneakers and then runs into her again when someone’s trying to steal said sneakers. Angel buys the girl a whole new outfit and gets her a job at some car repair joint whose owner owes Angel favors or something. The whole time I’m just wondering why my assassin movie has a distinct lack of assassination plotting and scenes.
She kills all her targets, the guy shows up demanding she rejoin him, she shoots him but he’s wearing a vest. She finds arcade boy, tells him she’s quit the business and wants to leave with him. Then the greatest moment in the movie happens. Arcade boy agrees to go with her, says, “What I got to lose?” and is immediately shot in the back by the guy. I have rarely seen such perfect comic timing.
Angel is distraught, guy taunts her because she threw her gun away, but she still refuses to go back with him. She walks away and we hear a gunshot off-screen, presumably the guy shooting himself. Then she walks off into the night. THE END.
This movie has the same fundamental problem nearly every Marimark production has: it doesn’t commit. The premise is absurd, but it’s a 90’s direct-to-video/direct-to-Cinemax piece. Absurd is not a flaw here. However, the movie doesn’t commit to its absurd premise—an assassin who gets her assignments from an arcade machine. What a stupid idea, but at least show me that stupid idea in action. That means seeing her track her targets, getting a sense of who these targets are, why we’re rooting for them to die, and seeing her execute them in compelling ways.
The video game tells her literally where the person hangs out and she goes there and shoots them. Sometimes she has a quip, but usually not. What I’ve said here is the extent of every assassination scene. The final guy she kills is playing a priest in a movie and she’s suddenly there, cast as the nun who assassinates him in the movie. Nothing leads up to that moment. She gets the name and then she’s in a habit with a gun. Getting there would be a movie itself and we get nothing!
So the movie doesn’t commit to its killer plot, but it’s also trying to pitch itself as softcore porn. After every kill, she needs “the thrill,” as the guy says. We don’t see the first kill, but we see her hook up with douchecanoe for an extended sex scene in a bathtub that includes a fair amount of nudity.
That scene is the first and only sex scene in the movie and the only instance of nudity. I’m not someone champing at the bit for more sex and nudity in movies, I’m saying decide what your movie is and do that. If this is a cheapo titty flick with a whisper of plot, fine. That’d be boring, but it’d be something. This movie isn’t even that, although it’s purporting to be that in the first ten minutes. Somehow, that has always struck me as being worse.
Ultimately the movie is boring when it’s not confusing. It has a cartoonish logic but is trying to have sincere emotional moments. It has pretenses of being a thriller but never has any set-ups that would cause tension. It has a variety of kills but none of them are novel or visually interesting. The movie is, 100% a Marimark production. As such, you can gleefully skip it.
No comments:
Post a Comment