Director: Noel Nosseck
Writer: Walter Dallenbach
From: Cult Cinema (only 5 remain!)
A trio of women plan a heist in the Circus Circus Casino.
Three women plan to rob Eversull, the manager of the Circus Circus Casino, who’s running guns and girls through the place (girls that he apparently assaults). The women are Lucky-the ringleader in a relationship with one of the guards; Carol-the magician’s assistant who owes $15,000 to bookies; Lisa-the trapeze artist who’s going to be sneaked into the office. The whole enterprise is being organized by a shadowy figure.
Not quite enough happens in the run-up to the heist. Carol is attacked by her bookie who then breaks into her place and finds the floorplan for the office they’re going to rob. You’d expect that to result in him betraying Carol to the guy she’s going to rob, but he instead threatens her on the night of the heist by accusing her of planning to skip town. Lisa is there, though, and incapacitates him.
The heist itself is relatively simple: during a special high-rollers’ night on the upper floor of the casino, Lucky will lower a rope from the bathroom window that will allow Lisa to scale the casino and climb into Eversull’s office. Eversull has just received a down payment on some automatic weapons, money that’s hidden in a secret drawer in his office. Once Lisa has the money, she’ll climb into a modified buffet cart being pushed by Carol who’s picked up the shift from one of her friends in the kitchen.
The plan generally works. Lisa slips a bit climbing the rope, but doesn’t fall. A sniper on a billboard across from the casino shoots out a car’s tire causing an accident and then a fight in front of the place to serve as a distraction. Carol, though, gets groped by one of the high-rollers. When she tells him “no,” he accuses her of stealing from him and she gets grabbed by security. Lucky has to run to the office and get the cart out which she manages to do just before Eversull arrives with her boyfriend.
Eversull realizes he’s been robbed and guesses Carol was part of it. While Lucky and Lisa go to the rendezvous point, an Old West amusement park, Eversull beats the details out of Carol. He has her take him to the park where he ambushes the other two, but he gets ambushed by the boyfriend—the mastermind of the heist. A minor shoot-out ensues that ends when Eversull takes Lucky hostage. The boyfriend says to shoot her, but, if Eversull does, there’s nothing to protect him from the boyfriend. Lucky goes free and they let Eversull go even though he’ll have to answer to all the crime syndicates that are being ripped off right now. Lucky and her boyfriend embrace and leave together for Montana. THE END
The movie’s not bad, it’s just a bit thin. We start with Lucky being told she has two days to pull off the heist and then gradually meet the rest of her team and learn about their situations and motivations. Only her team is two people and their situations and motivations are pretty straightforward: Carol is a gambler who owes a lot of money to violent bookies and Lisa is a trapeze artist who’s becoming afraid of heights. If anyone’s role and motivation is unclear, it’s Lucky’s, but we never get much about her. Her job is to be the good-luck girl for high-rollers at the casino--essentially a professional gambler who gambles with other people’s money. I think. I don’t know much about Vegas or gambling. That’s what it looked like from the movie.
I wanted more character, more incident. The modern touchstones for heist movies is the Oceans franchise, and with those you not only have teams of 8, 11, 12, and 13, respectively, you also have the failure of the heist getting flipped into having been part of the plan all along. In other words, the movies have twists. This movie is just a straight line.
Also, the movie had the opportunity to be bigger, to do more. As I noted in the description, Eversull is hiring sex workers and then assaulting them. This happens off-screen (thank you movie), but is a moment that isn’t followed up on. I guess it’s supposed to establish him as violent toward women so we aren’t surprised when he beats Carol at the end, but I wanted some payoff from the sex workers themselves—that they’re part of the plot, or their madame organizes some sort of revenge for him, something. Instead, the role of the sex worker in the plot is her same role within the world of the movie: to be an object that communicates another character’s identity, not a character herself.
I’m just saying, if this guy is victimizing people, have the victims be part of the plot to ruin him. That’s a really satisfying thing to have in stories.
Anyway, the movie’s all right, neither great nor terrible. I wouldn’t recommend seeking it out, but if you stumble across it somehow, I wouldn’t recommend turning it off either.
No comments:
Post a Comment