Hmm, I’m once again finding myself not liking this week’s movie as much as everyone else it seems. That doesn’t mean I thought it was bad, it’s just that I guess I’m not seeing something in it that’s striking hot with others.
In short, we have a tale of a man and his posse knocking off drugstores to get their next fix and keep their delinquent lifestyle afloat. Eventually, one ODs, and Bob, the leader, steps away from the life after this which not only separates him from the drug-riddled life, but also from his lifelong lover. Despite his efforts to live a normal life, Bob is attacked from a past associate of the drug world, and now he’s off to the hospital where they’re most likely going to dose him up with pain meds and probably cause him to relapse and fall back into the life.
The thing I probably liked the most from this is how we saw addicts put their addiction above everything else. Dianne keeps wanting sex from Bob, but Bob is too wrapped up on thinking about the next score. When Bob leaves the life, Dianne straight up refuses to join him because the drugs are more important than him. She goes to be with Rick even though she most likely doesn’t love him like she did Bob, but Rick’s the one with the drugs, so the choice is easy. Tom the priest places a bottle of pills on top of a bible symbolizing that his love for the drug is higher than his love for the Lord.
So the themes of the film are good and all, but at times the film was a little dull for me. There’s never really a point of mounting tension because they get out of situations in a stoic sort of way. I felt the transferring of the dead body past dozens of cops could have been more thrilling, but it was as simple as putting her in a bag and then in the trunk. I can see the amusement of laughing at the cops for this happening right under their nose, but the scene was still drab.
Bob was annoying, controlling, and superstitious, and I was never really rooting for him and wasn’t too invested for how things would play out for him. His fear of hexes is actually a scapegoat of his real fear of seeing himself and the life he’s living. He blames the bad stuff happening to him on something as dumb as a hat in a bed because it deflects from him having to admit it’s his bad choices in life that is netting bad stuff happening to him. We see even after he’s going through his detoxing and after he gets shot, he warns Gentry to tell Dianne to watch out for the “hat”. Even while living the clean life, he’s still blaming his downfalls on hexes without ever taking responsibility that he’s reaping what he sowed by living the criminal drug life. This shows his attempt to change is futile, and he’s most likely going to fall back into the life. So while the Bob character is the most fleshed out, I found myself still being indifferent about him. I don’t know, something just didn’t click with me. The rest of the posse was just kinda there.
The way the film looks stands out to me because it looks like it came out in the late 90s/early 2000s with the way it’s shot because it looked more modern than its release year with exception of how dated the cars and phones looked. I didn’t even realize this was supposed to be taking place in the 70s.
To wrap up, this is a competently directed and acted film that potrays a notable theme, and there are some scattered laughs here and there, such as dropping the corpse from the crawl space, but its central characters are a bit ho-hum, and the story coasts along without becoming too entralling. I found this to be just okay.
I have a fight coming up on 12/16, matter of fact, so if you're in Denver hit me up for a ticket.
