Blu-ray Review: Free Fall (2014)

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Even without saddling him with the Ayn Rand epic-worthy name of Thaddeus Gault, as soon as we see that the man embodying the far-too-smooth, selfishly shady CEO at the heart of Free Fall is none other than iconic screen villain Malcolm McDowell, we know right from the start that he’ll be the one calling all the shots of the suspense that should – by all rights – follow.

Unfortunately Fall’s screenwriter and editor in particular don’t seem to have the same faith in the viewers (or the movie’s every-woman heroine Jane Porter played by I Spit on Your Grave actress Sarah Butler) that we initially had in them.

Rather than build upon that unsettling wave of terror established in the span of a handful of frames as a body lands on top of a car in the opening sequence, the filmmakers slow the action down to a crawl and leave it there for roughly twenty minutes.

And while there’s a great film to be found in Free Fall – the one that made it to the final cut of this recently released Anchor Bay Blu-ray isn’t it.

Spending entirely too much of the film’s ever-critical first act slowly connecting the John Grisham Firm-like dots of the corporation’s evil practices from fraud to the fatally forced retirement plans for professionals unwilling to look the other way (such as Jane’s recently deceased mentor), Free Fall misgauges the strengths of what should’ve simply been a Red Eye, Panic Room, or P2 style thriller.

Instead of watching Jane try to make it out of her workplace alive after she finds herself trapped in an elevator based game of chicken with D.B. Sweeney’s crisis management executive (aka Gault’s hired hitman), Free Fall inspires yawns and apathy with dull office posturing and politics early on.

Likewise, following the cat-and-mouse excitement that arises once Sweeney reveals his true intentions, Free Fall goes against the genre tradition of empowering women to try and save themselves. All but giving up on the heroine once she hits the elevator, the filmmakers bring in a likable but wholly unnecessary new character for the awkward final half without bothering to fully flesh out either role.

While McDowell’s casting as Thaddeus Gault is a bit too on the nose, it’s interesting for Cutting Edge star Sweeney (who intriguingly once brought the character of Rand’s John Galt to cinematic life in an adaptation of Atlas Shrugged) to be given the role of the heavy even if the script offers him very little to do.

Not realizing that the thing that makes movies like P2 and Panic Room work so well is their sense of “you are here” visceral urgency that makes us imagine what we’d do if we were all in our heroine’s place, while the actors all give it their best shot, unfortunately the film never manages to ignite a single spark.

To its credit however, it is helped along by a few glimmering flickers from Jonathan Hall’s gorgeously crisp and nicely contrasted wood and steel toned cinematography to a few tense moments of man vs. man or Jane vs. ruthless businessmen action, which do their damndest to distract us from the otherwise wooden script.

While Free Fall manages to hold your interest as an inefficient yet nonetheless ambitious workmanlike yarn in desperate need of a rewrite, overall you’re much better off selecting one of those other – not quite real-time but all-in-one-night – vastly superior reality driven horror stories.

An inauspicious directorial effort from Halloween franchise producer Malek Akkad that’s filled with clumsy gaps in logic (from an endless bullet supply to a head-scratcher of a reference to a character we’ve never met in a pivotal scene), Free Fall sets itself up to be a great source of elevator based horror but ultimately it's as trapped as our heroine is with no chance of easy escape.

Having been stuck in an elevator in real life (with a nine month pregnant woman during a power outage no less), I can certainly attest that the emotionally charged setting is ripe for horror before you even add to it.

Nonetheless, the vantage point of a young woman playing chicken with a corporate hitman from a panic room-like steel cage trapped between two floors is far more thrilling than any CSPAN worthy paradigm… regardless of its villain’s last name.

Text ©2014, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.

DVD Review: Delgo (2008)

Now Available On DVD

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As grueling as it is to actually sit down and view the work in the form of a motion picture-- at the very least, co-director Marc F. Adler and Jason Maurer’s feature filmmaking debut Delgo can be considered a bold experiment. And as such, it’s one that’s worth exploring purely for those interested in the business side of independent filmmaking... even if the finished product is visually unappealing, filled with far too many characters, and seems to crib extensively from far superior tales by Peter Jackson, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Ang Lee.

Although it was conceived and written as the first installment of an intended trilogy, the film which was admirably completed entirely away from the traditional Hollywood studio system and funded fully from private equity reportedly “had the lowest per-theater gross on its opening weekend of any wide release in American film.”

While admittedly the lack of a good studio push or ad campaign most likely hindered it beyond repair, Adler and Maurer knew going into the venture that spreading word-of-mouth for their labor-of-love would be an uphill climb. To combat this, the guys took a proactive route and made an unprecedented decision to let audiences around the world in on the entire filmmaking experience.

By posting the movie’s dailies on Delgo’s official website, it enabled the directors to utilize the free advertising of the internet by sharing “rough footage, fragments of animation as they were being scrutinized, polished, and reworked." This action “was a first for any active studio production," yet the movie being served up by the filmmakers in collaboration with their animation team at Fathom Studios independently made another creative marketing decision along the way.

To this end, they used their budget wisely to secure an amazing roster of talent to voice the film and then spread out the casting announcements to help build up anticipation for Delgo. Yet perhaps because the entire production lasted more than five years—going well beyond Kubrick Eyes Wide Shut territory— eventually I’m assuming the novelty of watching a live film being made wore off. And this may have overwhelmingly been the case when the lead voice actors--Freddie Prinze Jr. and Jennifer Love Hewitt-- were no longer quite as in-demand as they had been many years earlier or when viewers discovered how poorly conceived the plot-line was at its very core.

Essentially, we’re presented with a star-crossed lover story straight out of Romeo and Juliet or West Side Story via this wrong-side-of-the-magical-world Jhamora scenario as our main character Delgo (Prinze Jr.) becomes friends with an independent princess Kyla (Hewitt).

Furthermore, each character comes from two feuding civilizations which is visually apparent right away as Delgo originates from the Lockni natives in what appears to have been a misguided animation attempt wherein, instead of Shrek, he resembles a gecko crossed with a dinosaur crossed with a person. Fortunately for Hewitt's character, Princess Kyla was hit with the adorable pixie fairy-like stick as a member of Nohrin royalty who seems to be hoping for a role as Tinkerbell's understudy if she ever went "punk."

When you add in a backstory involving murder and then frame the current relationship of the two teens amidst a series of misunderstandings, the plot becomes increasingly convoluted until predictably it ends with the important message about the need for tolerance and peace.

Utilizing nearly the same number of writers as it took years to complete the work which is sadly the final film of Hollywood legend and actress Anne Bancroft, ultimately Delgo never effectively engages us on any level with unappealing animation completed entirely on computers that still comes across murky and dull on the DVD in addition to its cliché heavy, forgettable plot.

While it was a brilliant attempt and great strategy to use their finances to secure not just the aforementioned actors but also Val Kilmer, Malcolm McDowell, Louis Gossett Jr., Burt Reynolds, Eric Idle, Chris Kattan and Kelly Ripa, when you discover that the impressive Michael Clarke Duncan ended up recording his vocal work 3,000 miles away from where the production was taking place, then it’s no wonder that most of those involved sound only halfheartedly caught up in the feature.

Again, I do admire and applaud what normally would’ve been an ingenious publicity and marketing strategy had they started with the most important building block of a solid script, made the animation easier on the eyes and completed the work in a year or two. Unfortunately the only intriguing insight I can offer you about Delgo is that halfway through the film I was so bored that I realized if you turned the letters around it spells “Ogled” and sadly, this isn’t one film you won’t want to have ogled.

Text ©2009, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com
Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited.

DVD Review: She Fell Among Thieves (1978)

The Show That Launched
Mystery! on PBS Arrives
On DVD from Acorn Media
4/14/09

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In Robert Altman’s startling multiple narrative structured Short Cuts and Ray Lawrence’s unsettling Jindabyne-- two cinematic adaptations which drew from author Raymond Carver's dark short story So Much Water So Close To Home-- the filmmakers stared deep into the heart of contemporary apathy as fishermen ignore a dead body and go about their day.

While Altman, Lawrence, and Carver all illustrated one extreme of inhumanity, there is an entirely different extreme used to draw in Malcolm McDowell's hero Richard Chandos into a web of murder and deceit upon discovering a body while fishing in the 1922 French Pyrenees set She Fell Among Thieves.

Essentially a British tourist on holiday who’s worried about being held for months by the French police if he reports a deceased man flowing quickly downstream when all he has as evidence is a shoe-- while Richard initially decides to grow through political, diplomatic channels involving the consulate and British higher-ups, soon enough and without a whole lot of logic, he decides to get involved himself and solve the mystery.

And, of course while amateur sleuths provide entertaining fodder and anyone familiar with McDowell’s turns in projects such as Clockwork Orange or Heroes (or anything in between), realizes that the man who brought author Anthony Burgess’ most wicked creation Alexander DeLarge to life for Kubrick’s Orange is more than capable of taking care of himself—in the case of She Fell Among Thieves-- we’re not exactly dealing with the benign and low-key crimes of most classic British drawing room mysteries.

The 17th episode that aired in 1978 as part of the British television series, BBC2 Play of the Week, She Fell Among Thieves also has the lofty distinction of being the first BBC drama to launch PBS networks’ wildly successful and long-running series, Mystery! upon its 1980 air-date.

Adapted by Tom Sharpe from Dornford Yates’ novel for veteran and award-winning television director Clive Donner, the “mystery” element of the work is virtually nonexistent as right from the start, we recognize that Thieves actually seems more at home in the genres of high camp or Gothic B-movie horror.

The made-for-television movie is anchored by a ferocious and devious portrayal by Eileen Atkins as Vanity Fair (not to be confused with the novel or Mira Nair’s film starring Reese Witherspoon) as a cross between Norma Desmond and Baby Jane looking gaudy and frightful with blood red lipstick and twilight blue eye shadow that appears on her face twenty-four hours a day. And with Vanity Fair, we're presented with one dastardly stepmother who would easily give Snow White’s Wicked Queen and Sleeping Beauty’s Maleficent a run for the title of a much more literal version of Queen “B.”

While she would never stoop to something as cliched as a veritable “shotgun wedding,” Atkins’ twisted widow who bosses around a lowly group of villains is more than happy to do whatever it takes to ensure that her beautiful, young stepdaughter breaks the contractual obligation stipulated in her deceased father's will by marrying before she comes of age.

With time running out and millions on the line that would fall to the lovely Jenny (Mary Poppins and Three Lives of Thomasina star Karen Dotrice), thereby taking away Vanity Fair's power as the Mistress of Chateau Jezreel—Vanity steps up her plan of torturous action trying to drug Jenny and any available groom into the shackles of matrimony.

Screenwriter Tom Sharpe tries his best to inject Thieves with some much needed dark humor, not to mention some very thinly disguised irony about the idea of marriage being worse than death. And while a few of the henchmen do provide a laugh-- Atkins chews the scenery with the best of them in a campy take that Bette Davis and Joan Crawford would’ve seriously found amusing and enviable.

However, the plot becomes unnecessarily complicated, filled with foolish doppelgangers, some head-scratching twists, and increasingly ridiculous situations as it hurries along Brides of Fu Manchu style, all the while drawing confused giggles and questioning by viewers asto just why McDowell’s character would’ve voluntarily agreed to go undercover in this haunted house of loony creeps.

Although it’s safe to say you’ve never seen a BBC mystery quite like this as Thieves goes for Gothic camp over the traditional Agatha Christie modeled fare with which we’re usually treated and the actors all give it their best even when the final act seems to draw from fairy tales and a pre-Princess Bride reminiscent setup involving a high tower no less—ultimately, one wonders why this particular 17th episode was selected to first bring to American viewers.

Intrigued by the high quality of the BBC and its fine productions—it would be nice to see tales from the two complete seasons of BBC2 Play of the Week and in spite of its flaws, Acorn Media did a great job of dressing up the 1978 production with subtitles and Dolby Digital surround.

Retaining its original full-screen 4:3 aspect ratio and without much improvement on the picture quality in its digital transfer, you may have to adjust your television settings to find the ideal presentation of it but PBS Mystery! buffs who have the patience may indeed get a kick out of exploring the origins of their favorite long-running network series… at least for the novelty of watching McDowell play a good guy.

Although, I think you’ll agree, there’s got to be a happy medium between Carver’s nonchalance and apathy and McDowell’s overly-eager decision to turn into a Hardy Boy—or in other words, when you see a dead body-- call the police!