Inside Man (2023) While suffering through this soporific pathetic imitation of 'Goodfellas' , BQ remembered the flood of 'Pulp Fiction' knockoffs that flooded theaters and video stores throughout the mid 1990's......
Junk movies, most of them......but in their slavish devotion to the tropes of Tarantino, they couldn't help but be fun to watch at the very least. Rapid-fire jokey patter, filled with pop culture references always preceded the sudden blood splattering massacres......and anybody could die at any time.....(my own personal fave among these included one that wiped out a sizable chunk of the supporting cast halfway through....)
Ah...those were the days....
Which, sorry to say, brings us back to "Inside Man", a dark low budget attempt to duplicate the gangsters-and-rogue cop corpse-fests of Martin Scorsese's "Goodfellas", and "The Departed".
To save you beloved BQ visitors the dreary task of sitting through this, simply imagine a Scorsese cop 'n scumbags movie drained of pacing, dramatic impact and any hint of directorial imagination.
Our lead here is volcanic tempered cop Bobby Belucci (Emile Hirsch, the store brand DiCaprio) whom we see first see pounding his estranged wife's new boyfriend into raw steak....
Reduced to desk work as punishment, the hyper, unhinged Bobby somehow convinces his boss to let him go undercover to expose a notorious bunch of kill-crazy mobsters. They're under the command of their psychopath-in-chief Roy Demeo (the film's director, Danny A. Abeckaser).
As his point of entry, Bobby uses his befriending of Chris Rosenberg (Jake Cannavale), the gang's twitchy bottom feeder and something of a surrogate son to Roy. But Chris's dumb plan to cut his own deal with Columbian drug lords goes bloodily south, touching off the expected reign of carnage for one and all.
As the bodies pile up, the film throws in what it no doubt considers a side bonus, the sight of some poor sucker who owned the gang money being promptly executed and sawed into random pieces for easy dumpster disposal.......
We realize we run the risk of making this film sound more interesting than it actually is. So let's make this clear.....
"Inside Man" is a boring slog to get through. It moves at a comatose pace. None of the characters rise above the usual standard lineups of 'scumsucking goon' straight from Central Casting. The only Odd Girl Out here....... rom-com refugee Lucy Hale, showing up as the gang's resident bartender and part-time moll whenever a horny victim needs luring to his gory doom. If only she'd had more than 5 minutes screen time, we could have stayed awake longer.
And finally memo to director-actor Abeckaser.......find your own voice and don't waste time carbon copying Scorsese. Just ask all those guys who directed the Tarantino knockoffs.....if you can find any....
BQ advises to stay way outside of 'Inside Man'.....not worth a minute of anyone's time.
Zero stars (0)..
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