Who’d thunk ‘twould be easier to pull the wool over critic’s eyes on faux Robert Bresson than on faux Quentin Tarantino? (Make that Tarantino seasoned with Guy Ritchie & the Coen Brothers, all in ‘90s mode.) Leave it to Paul Schrader, here directing but not writing*, on a by-the-numbers actioner about a trio of former prison pals, savage, amoral, drug-addled low-I.Q. goons who get together for the expected jokey, foul-tongued, ultra-gory violence (yet still a party!) working drug scams for small change before stepping up for a larger score kidnaping a mobster’s kid; only to watch it all quickly go south. Trashed by reviewers and left for dead at the box-office, Schrader followed with his career-reviving, Bresson steeped, DIARY OF A COUNTRY PRIEST/'51 rethink, FIRST REFORMED/’17, his best received pic in decades. What neat justice if this grubby little film turned out to be as underrated as REFORMED was overrated.* Alas. As lead thug, Nicolas Cage does warn us of the Humphrey Bogart act he’ll put on toward the end, distancing himself from one more pointless killing, here an unlucky, overweight Black couple; Willem Dafoe winks at us before similar distasteful work, with needless, lethal bloodletting for a doomed mom & daughter pair of unlucky, overweight gals in a pink house (doomed by decor?); then there's unlucky, overweight third-wheel criminal partner Christopher Matthew Cook taking himself out thru bad driving. Do I see a pattern here? Strangely, the fattest guy on screen survives; none other than Paul Schrader playing the mob fixer who gives the boys their running orders. You get to do that when you’re the director.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Written by Matthew Wilder. Three credits on IMdB earning what may be a record low 4.1 rating average. Low ratings on IMdB, hardly a bad sign in many cases, but here . . .
DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *See for yourself: https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/02/first-reformed-2017.html
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