| C+ | Austin Film Festival 2022 |
I knew we were in trouble about three minutes in.
The movie starts with the main character in a graveyard (during the day) speaking into a digital recorder, saying very suave but content-free things about the trouble he’s in. A little cliche, but I decide they’re just setting tone and going to see the backstory soon instead of having it spoken at us.
Then the car appears, and starts driving quickly towards him. What does the main character do? He starts running down the road, ahead of the car! It’s bad enough in any movie when any character tries to outrun oncoming danger instead of trying to dodge it. But this guy is in a graveyard! What better place to zig-zag through terrain that a car cannot follow?
The film got a little better from there, but not a whole lot. The dialog seemed pretty polished, almost glib. But the main character was a doofus. The whole movie had trouble finding a balance between comedy and thriller. The plot was pretty straightforward: A leads to B leads to C—sometimes too conveniently. And although the ending was surprising, it was not very satisfying.
The main actor, Jason Selvig, did a decent job. The bright spot was the character of Charlie, played by Kara Young—she was fun to watch.
The writer/directors said in the Q&A they originally intended this to be an international thriller, then COVID hit and they scaled it down to a much more intimate movie. I can’t even imagine what the larger version would have been like…
