I saw the last hour or so of this on late-night TV, and so I had the sound turned down pretty far... but even so, the dialogue is mostly muttered or mumbled, and it was nearly impossible to tell any details about what was going on. Having
read the summary, I do believe I got the gist of what it was supposed to be
about. It's got a pretty solid cast, which is why I decided to stay up and see it through - Sheryl Lee, Mickey Roarke, Jason London, David Arquette - surely at least one of these actors should have been on it? Alas, only Mickey Roarke
comes close, and that's because his character has hardly any nuance - he's just the vicious thug at the top of the heap of vicious thugs. And there's just a whole lot of sweaty guys, in close shots with a key light picking them out of a dark background (this happened consistently), wearing filthy wifebeaters and
amusing 50's hick town haircuts. Or maybe that's just Billy Baldwin, but good lord, he sure is sweaty, and his head sure is pointy. There's the whole bondage and violence aspect, which does indeed take on a heavily homoerotic tinge.
The addition of Sheryl Lee, looking bizarrely aged, as a bank employee who is nowhere near as sweet and naive as she seems, strikes me as an afterthought
to make sure that it's not all just sweaty, muscled guys with D.A.'s punching each other around and tying one another up. The pacing is bizarre (by the time the final violent climax happens, I was so de-sensitized to bullets and blood that I hardly recognized it as a climax), the acting is either wooden or way over the top (watching Billy Baldwin, you'd think this was a comedy; watching Jason London, you'd think he'd just come out of dental surgery), and to say that the plot "twists" were predictable would be a redundancy. Oh well, I guess a movie was made,
and a cast and crew got paid; other than that, I see no reason for this to have ever existed.
read the summary, I do believe I got the gist of what it was supposed to be
about. It's got a pretty solid cast, which is why I decided to stay up and see it through - Sheryl Lee, Mickey Roarke, Jason London, David Arquette - surely at least one of these actors should have been on it? Alas, only Mickey Roarke
comes close, and that's because his character has hardly any nuance - he's just the vicious thug at the top of the heap of vicious thugs. And there's just a whole lot of sweaty guys, in close shots with a key light picking them out of a dark background (this happened consistently), wearing filthy wifebeaters and
amusing 50's hick town haircuts. Or maybe that's just Billy Baldwin, but good lord, he sure is sweaty, and his head sure is pointy. There's the whole bondage and violence aspect, which does indeed take on a heavily homoerotic tinge.
The addition of Sheryl Lee, looking bizarrely aged, as a bank employee who is nowhere near as sweet and naive as she seems, strikes me as an afterthought
to make sure that it's not all just sweaty, muscled guys with D.A.'s punching each other around and tying one another up. The pacing is bizarre (by the time the final violent climax happens, I was so de-sensitized to bullets and blood that I hardly recognized it as a climax), the acting is either wooden or way over the top (watching Billy Baldwin, you'd think this was a comedy; watching Jason London, you'd think he'd just come out of dental surgery), and to say that the plot "twists" were predictable would be a redundancy. Oh well, I guess a movie was made,
and a cast and crew got paid; other than that, I see no reason for this to have ever existed.