Here’s a movie I knew pretty much nothing about. I saw it primarily for a couple of the crew names behind it, such as John Leonetti as director of photography and most notably Joel McNeely as composer. I knew it starred Lindsay Lohan and assuming the title to be fairly accurate was a murder thriller. I also really liked the minimal but stylistic poster (the one here in the review). Frankly, I wasn’t expecting a whole lot, seeing as the studio put forth precisely zero effort in advertising the thing. I never once saw a commercial or trailer for this movie. If I weren’t the type of person to browse the posters at the theaters and investigate film titles I don’t recognize that are in showtime listings, I’d never have known this film even existed. While I don’t think it’s a great film, it was entertaining enough, and frankly better than I was expecting given the brush-off it’s getting from the studio.

Writing: While there’s some clever stuff in this film, the script falls a bit short of brilliant. That’s not to say that it’s bad, cause it isn’t, but it lacks a bit of wit and has trouble getting a narrative flow going. Then again, the latter may be the shortcoming of the director/production rather than a shortcoming of the script.

Production: Here’s the strong point and weak point of the film. Certain things about it are excellent, such as Leionetti’s cinematography and McNeely’s score, which comes as no surprise. Then there’s some weak elements to go with it, such as the extremely poor editing and overly obvious and exploitative directing. While it may be something of an obvious film school trick, I loved the use of color in the film to serve the plot. In this case, it was infusing the wholesome personality with blue and the sinful one with red. On the subject of sinful red, one of the biggest problems of the film is the over-use of strip tease material for Lohan’s role. OK, we get it, she’s a dancer at a sleazy strip club. The opening credit sequence was surely enough to establish that. You don’t need to keep going back to that. The sequences may be well shot by Leonetti, but they are the very definition of pointlessly gratuitous.

Cast: I kinda wonder if one of the main contributing factors for the studio abandoning this movie was Lohan as the star. She’s having more than her fair share of bad press lately, and the studio may have just written it off as a low budget film that would have an uphil advertising battle they didn’t want to bother with. Lohan does a good enough job in the film. Not a best performance of the year or anything, but she does good enough with the material to make it work well. She’s joined by a couple fantastic actors that bring a bit more to their roles than they probably warrant, such as Neal McDonough, Julia Ormond & Paula Marshall.

Music: Joel McNeely, one of the most underused and undervalued film composers in the industry does something he does better than most anyone else - channeling a particular composer or style without directly knocking it off. In this case, he’s channeling the likes of Bernard Herrmann and other old school noir thriller composers. Dark and delecate, McNeely’s score does a nice job with the material. It got a nice release on CD from Varese Sarabande.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 1st, 2007 at 11:15 pm and is filed under Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.