The Prodigy
Starting with a chilling video interview with an unidentified child who has just killed someone, the film moves into an almost monochromatic, rainswept scene of two men in a car discussing what may be a bust, or possibly a sting. It's all a bit clichéd but not unbearably so right up to the moment of the armed stand-off, reminiscent of True Romance. Then the action kicks in, in an excellently choreographed shoot out sequence, which gets ramped up by the appearance of an unstoppable one-man killing machine. After killing practically everyone in the room, only the hero of the film is left alive and goes one-on-one with the brutal assassin, eventually drowning him in the bath, or so he thinks.
The story jumps forward several months and the hero, Truman, played by the movie's co-writer Holt Boggs, is called in by a gangland boss to help find his nephew, who has been taken by a mysterious man calling himself Claude Rains, the same one Truman thought he had killed. And so begins a frantic cat and mouse game with the antagonist seemingly always managing to stay one step ahead of his pursuers.
For a low budget movie, shot on video, it not only looks good, making full use of the format to achieve a mixture of noir, reportage and surveillance camera look, adjusting the colour grading to suit the mood of the scene. Apart from the technical aspect, where it really succeeds is in maintaining suspense. You know something nasty is going to happen but you don't know what or when. The dialogue can be corny and clichéd at times, but most action films aren't known for their dialogue.
There were some similarities to Se7en, not just with the look of the movie but with the killer's continual diatribe against society, although Rains' is nowhere as eloquent as that delivered by John Doe. And like Fincher's film it has a surprise ending, but not quite as shocking, but one that keeps you guessing.
For a first movie it is a great effort and one that keeps you enthralled. It's level of violence may not be to everyone's taste, but budgetary constraints do mean that most of the gore is not actually shown on screen. Se7en also used a similar method of gore by inference, which left audiences convinced they had seen more than they really did. So if you liked Se7en this is certainly worth a look, if it gets distribution.
The story jumps forward several months and the hero, Truman, played by the movie's co-writer Holt Boggs, is called in by a gangland boss to help find his nephew, who has been taken by a mysterious man calling himself Claude Rains, the same one Truman thought he had killed. And so begins a frantic cat and mouse game with the antagonist seemingly always managing to stay one step ahead of his pursuers.
For a low budget movie, shot on video, it not only looks good, making full use of the format to achieve a mixture of noir, reportage and surveillance camera look, adjusting the colour grading to suit the mood of the scene. Apart from the technical aspect, where it really succeeds is in maintaining suspense. You know something nasty is going to happen but you don't know what or when. The dialogue can be corny and clichéd at times, but most action films aren't known for their dialogue.
There were some similarities to Se7en, not just with the look of the movie but with the killer's continual diatribe against society, although Rains' is nowhere as eloquent as that delivered by John Doe. And like Fincher's film it has a surprise ending, but not quite as shocking, but one that keeps you guessing.
For a first movie it is a great effort and one that keeps you enthralled. It's level of violence may not be to everyone's taste, but budgetary constraints do mean that most of the gore is not actually shown on screen. Se7en also used a similar method of gore by inference, which left audiences convinced they had seen more than they really did. So if you liked Se7en this is certainly worth a look, if it gets distribution.
posted by Chris Patmore at 6:15 pm
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