Rating: C-
Dir: Jason Trost
Star: Jason Trost, Sophie Merkley, James Remar, Lucas Till
Saw for superheroes. Ok, that’s a facile simplification of the plot here. But it’s not inaccurate. This takes place in an alternate world where something from outer space crashed to earth, and gave certain people abilities. Four of them – Charge (Prost), Shadow (Merkley), Cutthroat (Till) and The Wall (Lee Valmassy) wake to find themselves robbed of their powers, and facing a series of violent trials. Failure to comply or complete the assigned tasks will lead to the deaths of innocent civilians. These are the demands of supervillain Rickshaw (Remar), who is fed up of the quartet always preventing his evil plans from being successful. He’s now out for revenge, of the manipulative and sadistic kind.
I think my main problem with this, is the sensation I was watching the second film in a franchise, rather than the first. This feels very much in need of a prologue before we get to the kidnapping and trials. Without showing Charge and his pals using their superpowers, we just kinda have to take them on trust – and as we find out later, that’s not necessarily a good idea. Admittedly, given the budget of only twenty thousand dollars, I understand why any demonstration of abilities beyond a firm handshake were not included. However, this also leaves us in the dark with regard to Rickshaw, who presumably has talents of his own. Yet we have to take his status as a pre-existing villain on trust too.
Well, until he starts blowing people up, at least. Remar definitely seems to be having the most fun here, despite having almost no direct interaction with the rest of the cast – he appears, in a very Jigsaw-like fashion, only on TV screens. However, he sells his malicious intentions effectively, in a way reminiscent of a call-centre version of The Joker. On the other side, Trost is a square-jawed hero, whose closest cousin might be the Christian Bale version of Batman, with more moral grey. By the end, he’s doing things of which Bruce Wayne certainly would not approve, though none of his pals seem more than mildly disapproving of him. Mind you, their acting range may not stretch much past “mild disapproval”, sadly.
Given the circumstances, there’s a peculiar lack of urgency, considering the entire plot is basically driven by a series of ticking clocks. There’s an early scene where the four superheroes are given a couple of minutes to acquire weapons from a hardware store. However, they seem to be shopping with as much enthusiasm as my father, who turns ninety in October. If the heroes are acting like they can’t be bothered, it makes it harder for the audience to give a damn. The concept here is good, doing the “far from perfect superhero” thing well before Amazon made The Boys [though the comics on which that was based, first came out in 2006]. But unlike The FP, there isn’t enough energy here to cover up the cracks.