Body Count
Ultra obscure baby’s first noir with a star-studded cast. The producers must be crazy to throw away this, it’s not so unworthy to deserve the Direct to Video mark of shame.
The script alternates between funny banter and cold-blooded gruesome murder. It’s a pretty basic height gone wrong, in which the participants hate each other. The film starts in medias res, and both threads run in parallel, the preparation and the execution of said heist. Somewhere along the line, they pick up a stranded driver, played by Linda Fiorentino, so you know she’s not what she seems.
Besides her, you have several metric tonnes of testosterone. The Other Wahlberg is the dumb, but sane guy. Ving Rhames is the smart ass leader, after the mastermind played by Forrest Whittaker gets offed in the heist. David Caruso is … the driver slash psycho killer. John Leguizamo is the nutjob that everyone seems to tolerate.
Ultimately, the ending kinda ruins it. The final girl gets rid of everyone (most of the times by sheer luck, or some very subtle nudging) and rides into the sunset, right into the police blockade. The smart guy, sore from getting rejected by the femme fatale, gets “a cool mille” and retires to Florida probably.
They succumbed to the “just another twist!” disease, but all in all, the trip is more important than the destination.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.