Rating: C
Dir: Jaron Ikner
Star: Roy Phillips, Ashe Bridges, Zion Monroe, Jasmine Berber
This was shot, largely guerrila-style, in downtown Phoenix during the pandemic, and pointedly centres around a similar disease. It takes place in “New Phoenix”, after the Aurora virus has wreaked havoc, and left the streets almost empty. In the apparent absence of government, the Dynamation corporation is in charge, forcing anyone infected with the virus into “wellness camps”, at the barrel of a gun if necessary. The mother of Malcolm (Bridges) and Zion (Phillips) Waters is one such victim. The sons go after her, through the wasteland of the city, and with a good deal of fraternal strife, encountering the forces of anti-Dynamation group TURN, The United Revolution Network, led by Dee Campbell (Monroe).
Of course, it’s faintly amusing to have a film set in the dystopian hellhole future of… um, the year 2025. In reality, Phoenix has completely reverted back: it’s as if COVID never happened. Given this, all the “epidemic porn” movies which have come out since, now feel a little ludicrous. Though I am impressed Ikner leveraged his stimulus payments to buy the camera equipment used to make the movie. What stands out here is the almost eerie sense of emptiness. There’s hardly anyone in the film who isn’t in the film: I think I saw somebody in the background of one shot. Given Phoenix is the fifth-biggest city in the US, I can only imagine it was achieved with a combination of lockdowns and a lot of early mornings.
The problems are the usual ones associated with debut, low-cost features. We begin with audio which occasionally sounds like it was recorded in a bucket: Ikner should have thrown some of that COVID cash at a mic or two. It also suffers from Callawayitis: the tendency of films written, produced, directed and edited by one person to be unnecessarily long. Here, there’s too much wandering of empty streets, and a chunk in the middle where Mrs. Waters seems completely forgotten. Instead, there’s internal strife in DUST, and a stolen teddy bear, whose relevance is obscure until very late. The budget shows up in what feels like Dynamation having two (2) employees, who spend the entire film getting their asses kicked (top). Finally, some of the supporting performances are not good, including a candidate for the least convincing news reader in film history.
All told though, I’ve seen worse. It looks clean and sharp, while the action (often a weakness in microbudget films) is okay. A fight between Malcolm and Dee even reaches the level of decent, and I laughed at the latter calling Malcolm “Blackie Chan.” Speaking of which, it’s ethnically interesting, in that Phoenix (and Arizona) are much more Hispanic than Black, but you’d not know it here. Seriously, I suspect Ikner used every African American in Maricopa County, considering the state ranks between Iowa and Nebraska, percentage-wise. Anyway, it’s nice to see someone who occupied themselves during lockdown by doing something productive with their time – rather than drinking hand sanitizer while binging episodes of Tiger King.