Aside from being another rote addition to the revenge-film canon, John Stockwell’s In The Blood is also a supreme waste of Gina Carano’s talent.
The film exhibits strong character interplay and resides in an unconventional milieu, in effect turning rote material into something that feels decidedly eccentric.
The film illustrates the suffocating officialdom and curious surveillance methods of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s regime during its waning years.
The film’s dialogue is knowing and the action sequences are elaborate, but only in ways that advance the shady story toward its hokey denouement.
Its blind reverence toward the Russian mythos is so grandiose that it becomes impossible to rescue it from self-importance.
The film’s various references to other stylistic touchstones, while thematically apt, rarely carry any sort of critical inquiry.
In the end, considering the numerous ways the film goes limp, it seems credibility still eludes the found-footage genre.
Strands of Simon Pegg’s amiable persona are found in the film’s more tolerable bits, but even this seasoned vet’s unique voice is lost amid the glut of references to other work.
Taylor Guterson’s film offers thoughtful, if familiar, comments on friendship, self-doubt, and romantic angst.
Because it defies and outright ridicules all notions of aesthetic intent, proper form, and moral propriety, this Z-film pastiche is essentially impervious to standard critical evaluation.
Ian Softley is far too interested in the minutia of the plot to bother with the Chabrolian elements of bourgeois excess or the Hitchcockian themes of mistaken identity.
Sini Anderson’s film may be another unimaginative fan letter, but at least Kathleen Hannah is worthy of such devotion.
It’s at its most fascinating when Jackie Stewart authoritatively and pedagogically discusses the nuances of his trade.
The sparse poeticism of author Willy Vlautin’s novel is gutted for this overdone film adaptation.
The film brings to mind the films of Philippe Garrel in its elliptical presentation of its characters’ lives, but Kees Van Oostrum’s genre experimentation aligns him with Paul Verhoeven.
Mike Mendez’s film is closer to recent sci-fi cable TV movies like Sharknado than the sleazy exploitation fare of the ’70s.
A moralistic ending is telegraphed from the beginning and routinely fulfilled by the end, rendering the rest of this trite, visually unappealing mess virtually worthless.
Intentionally or otherwise, Yusry Abd Halim allows the film, in all its candy-colored visuals and slow-mo-laden action scenes, to revel in its inherent campiness.
Its thinly veiled message of social conservatism and religious affirmations as the pathway to an ideal life is delivered with all the predigested sentimentality of a Hallmark card.
As Renny Harlin’s career progresses, it seems more and more that his early gems were merely happy accidents.