ChikPapa
Very disappointed :(
SmugKitZine
Tied for the best movie I have ever seen
BelSports
This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.
Michael Ledo
Angelo (Chris Mulkey) runs the LA gun dealing syndicate. He uses Haitians as his muscle. Rhyis (Amin Joseph) is the leader of the group of effective killers. Angelo has a tumor and little time to live. He anoints Rhyis as his crime heir to the dismay of his coke-head son Nicolas (T.J. Hoban). This creates issues. In addition Rhyis brother has been in contact with their long long father, who is also a very bad man.The film is rather long. It includes a subplot with Bai Ling which really doesn't connect well with the film and might have been added just to get a hot Asian chick on the DVD cover. One of the reasons for the length of the film is the extremely long orations and dissertations they have for conversation. Our bad guys are educated and speak clearly without the urban slang and often speak symbolically.The film does have killing, gun play, and one-on-one fighting but the lion's share of the feature is R.L. Scott lecturing the audience on the 10 stages of civilizations to a woman's self confidence to chess playing to bourbon aging.Guide: F-bomb. Brief sex and nudity.
strongblack-82623
This movie could have been good. When I started watching I thought maybe the heavy handed dialogue was setting up a crime epic; maybe they will harken back to the old kung fu movies. sadly, this is just another movie that is trying to hard.To get a good fight scene shot you'll want a panned out camera that features the participants, something to give you a sense for the geometry of the room and what people are doing where and when. This film's fights have that shaky camera mixed with lots of quick cuts to mask the gaps in kayfabe.The story is....just meh, It focuses on a group of gunmen that do something or other while their leader talks slow and menacingly to everyone. Apparently two of them are brothers of an ousted dictator or something, not that that really means anything to the plot or ending(I honestly don't know if there was a main antagonist outside of stupidity).There is a side plot where a recently dumped woman(by one of the "strap set")is taken in for training by a "tough and free" "badass" assassin lady. The acting in these scenes is sooo cringeworthy I'd be surprised if it's not up for a razzie award.I would have preferred a movie focusing on the history and relationship between the eye-patched assassin, the "tough" Asian lady gunman, and her sister.
